Midwifery Website Design & Development: Is Your Website Ready?
As a midwife, your website is the home base of your brand. It’s a staging platform where your potential clients are most likely to make the decision to either contact you or keep looking for something else. That’s a crucial step in the process of choosing you to be their care provider! And your midwifery website design needs to be ready to handle the responsibility.
That’s why today we’re going to break down what we want you to know about your midwifery practice or birth center website, from the very beginning all the way to the little details that will make your site what you need it to be.
- Get Organized With Your Website Hosting & Domain Hosting
We can’t tell you how often these items are problematic when helping midwives and birth centers with their websites. If your domain hosting and website hosting are a mess, you NEED to get this cleaned up. Ideally, your domain and website hosting should live in the same account to keep things simple. Auto-renewal should be turned on so that you don’t risk losing your domain. If you’re unaware of the state of your domain & hosting, your website is already in trouble.
As far as web hosting is concerned, we advocate for our client websites to be built on WordPress – it’s the hands down best platform for professional websites that you maintain full control over, and it has the best resources and software for you to grow your website’s functionality over time. After resolving domain & hosting issues, this is the 2nd thing we tend to look at when helping with a midwifery website. Get the right website type for you, but we’ll be happy to tell you why it’s WordPress anytime.
- Pick a Professional Design, and Keep it Simple
We won’t tell you what makes a good or bad design per say, but you know it when you see it. Modern websites are clean and simple, and every element is intentional – no random pieces of website fodder that don’t fit the overall look. FAR more important than addressing the subjective element of good website design is to make sure that your content is suitable for a modern website. That’s the nice way of saying that you really need to cut down on the written content on the main website pages. Web page content should be simple summaries of yourself, your team, the services you provide, and your unique approach. That’s it.
What you want your website to do is to prompt someone to contact you. It shouldn’t be a place where someone needs an hour to read through all of the pages. The only exception to this rule is within your blog posts. A blog post (like this one) is where people can go if they want more information, educational materials, and it’s where you can put your thoughts together and give Google the keywords you want to reach. Your other web pages just aren’t the place to do that.
- Set Your Midwifery Website or Birth Center Website Up for SEO Success
You need to approach SEO on two fronts: the website pages and development itself and the blog and keyword-heavy written content. We’ve written pretty extensively on the details of SEO in this other blog post. That post talks about what the pros should do vs what you should be handling, but however you decide to proceed, you should make a plan for how you will use and track your SEO as you go. You’ll want to set up a Google Search Console account and make sure that your site is indexing properly. You may also want plugins on your site that manage some of the simple SEO tasks for you. And without a doubt, you’ll want to be creating regular, keyword-heavy blog posts with information that you believe your target market will be looking for. SEO is a patience game – keep at it and you will win in the long term.
If you’ve addressed all of these elements of solid website design and development, you’re well on your way to a successful, high-converting website for your midwifery practice or birth center. Curious how Marketing TEA could help you accomplish all of this much quicker, cheaper, and with a heck of a lot more fun? Let’s have a chat.