When it comes to online medical marketing, website development and website design are perhaps its most neglected aspects. As a doctor, your primary focus remains on SEO, PPC, and SMM, but these medical marketing channels aren’t worth much when you haven’t got a medical website that can support these channels. In comes website development and design.
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Have you ever wondered, “What are website development and website design, and what can they both do for my medical practice? “While their names give away their concepts, website design and web development differ from each other on a more technical level.
As a doctor and an online healthcare practice owner, learning about the concepts of development and designing, their major differences and similarities, and how they benefit you can help you make informed decisions about your medical website so that you can stand ahead of your medical competitors, cater more patient traffic, and climb the stairs of SERP rankings.
What Is Medical Website Development?
Website development focuses on the technical features, also known as the building blocks, which create the interactive aspects of your medical website and allow the site to function properly. A website developer works with a website designer to develop your medical website to make it functional and attractive. When it comes to website development, front-end and back-end developers work together to create the website.
A front-end developer focuses on building code that determines how your medical website shows the concepts of the website designer. The back-end developer, on the other hand, effectively manages the data in your medical website’s database and enables that data to be shown on the front-end.
What Is Medical Website Design?
The concept of website design focuses on the appearance of a website. For example, a website designer focuses on the layout and color scheme as two aspects of the website’s appearance. The objective is to design a visually beautiful and easy-to-navigate website. In simple words, website design aims to provide a positive user experience.
An efficient website design has aesthetically pleasant features, is easy to navigate, feels relevant to the business or company, and is relevant to the target audience. Website designers generally produce or work with deliverables such as logo design, format, UI & UX design, and color palettes because website design is so focused on the visual components of the user interface and experience.
Medical Website Development V.S Medical Website Design: The Differences
To have an online medical practice, a fully functioning, attractive, interactive, and easy-to-navigate website is crucial. Web development and design both help you achieve that. Investing in both concepts is important. Here are some major differences that set apart development from designing to help you gain a much better understanding of both concepts:
Website Development Doesn’t Design Visual Elements
The primary distinction between site design and development is that web designers create visual elements that add aesthetic value to your medical website which improves user experience, while website developers are in charge of adding these features to it.
Using JavaScript and HTML, the website developer converts the website designer’s mockups into code. This makes the visual elements appear on your medical website. So the website designer is in charge of creating visual assets, while the website developer is in charge of using code to make those assets appear on the website.
Website Design Is Less Expensive Than Website Development.
Website design is typically less expensive than website development. This is because the concept involves coding knowledge. Since website design involves more creative work and website development involves technical coding, you are likely to pay more for the website development services.
If you were to hire a freelance website developer, it would charge you $35-$40 per hour, whereas a freelance website designer would charge $25-$30 per hour. To save yourself from this hassle, you can hire website development and design services from a medical SEO agency that will offer you packages instead of charging you by the hour.
Medical Website Development V.S Medical Website Design: The Similarities
Website design and website development share certain similarities and they all involve providing a pleasant online experience for your patient traffic. Taking a closer look at the links between website design and website development can help you see why they’re both necessary for a successful website. Here are some common similarities between website design and website development:
Both Strive To Create An Effect User Experience For Your Patients
User experience is essential to converting patient leads. Both website design and website development work together to provide optimal user experience to the patients visiting your traffic. While your medical website’s design ensures that your patient traffic can navigate your medical website easily, its development features ensure that the website is fully functional.
Your patients will not value your medical site if it looks attractive but is not interactive or glitches. Similarly how they will be bored with a website that loads fast but is too plain or “on-the-surface” to provide any kind of interaction or engagement. Focusing on both is important.
Both Add Cohesiveness To Your Medical Website
If you’re wondering whether you are better off investing in just one concept, you may be in danger of harming your patient traffic rates. To create a cohesive, uniform, and functional website, web design and web development must collaborate. Your medical web would be impersonal without proper web design applied to it and it would not function properly without any sort of development features working on the back-end.
What Should Doctors Know About Website Development V.S Website Design?
When it comes to website design and development, you should keep a few things in mind as an owner of a medical web. First off, proper communication with the agency you are working with for the development and design of your medical web is critical. The more specific you are about what you want, the more satisfied you will be with the results. You can create a list of features you wish to add to your medical web so that the results can meet your expectations.
Second, as an online medical business, you may already know the significance of mobile optimization for a website in 2022. More than half of the online traffic comes from searches made on mobile. So when you are getting your medical web developed or designed, make mobile optimization your top priority.
Website Development and Website Design: Both Matter For Doctors
The differences and the similarities between site designing and website development boil down to the role each concept plays in the creation and management of a web. While site development adds functionality to the site through code, website design aims to improve the user experience and interface, as well as make your medical web appealing to your patients. Which makes them both essential for your online medical practice.
With your understanding of what sets site development apart from web design, you can now make insightful decisions about optimizing and improving your medical site so that it can attract more patient traffic, appeal to Google’s algorithms for web designing, increase your rankings, and acquire optimal performance from your medical marketing strategies.