What to Look for in a Medical CMS Patform

If you are setting up and planning a medical website design you will need to consider many different factors for a content management system, or CMS, to make sure you are getting exactly what you need out of your site from an admin standpoint alone. Medical websites are usually content-heavy with the number of doctors, locations, and media so, therefore, they consist of many components, assets, and rotating content. It’s crucial to make sure your medical CMS platform can handle all of these different components and rich media and handle it well.

Necessary Items for an Easy-to-use Medical CMS

The last thing you want in a healthcare CMS platform is a platform that breaks easily when new information is added or cannot handle routine updates and regular content changes. You also want to make sure these different assets and components are well organized, easy to use, and easy to update on a regular basis as needed as you are likely to have changes and updates within the practice regularly. We’ve outlined a list of basic items for you to make sure your healthcare CMS has before you pick a platform for your medical website.

Organized backend for an intricate healthcare website

You want to make sure the backend of the website you design is well-organized and that the information you are putting into the CMS is easy to find. The last thing anyone needs when updating content on a medical website is difficulty finding where to do so. So be sure you have your development team or digital marketing agency show you where things are at and overall do an overview of how things are organized in your admin. At E-dreamz, our platform Echo is intuitive and one of our main goals for all of our clientele is ease-of-use. We include a scheduled walkthrough with our website design clients to show them how the many components are set-up so there are no surprises. Whatever system you end up going with, make sure it is easy to understand by being well organized and labeled well.

Security is a top priority for medical sites

The security of your website should be high on the priority list of things to look for in a medical content management system especially when dealing with sensitive patient information or payment details. This is all delicate information that you do not want hackers to find. One way of making sure your website is secure is to check to see that your site is HTTPS instead of just HTTP at the beginning. You should ask your development team or marketing agency about this before the process begins to make sure this is being done. There are many other ways to make sure your website is secure and here at E-dreamz this is a top priority for all of our websites and medical clients.

Easy-to-change and edit content and media

Doctors, locations, and news and media are just a few of the components of a medical CMS that will constantly be changed out and be updated. You’ll want to make sure that it is easy, and doesn’t require a development team, to change out this content as you need to. Be sure your web development team can tell you exactly where and how to do this within the admin they use to develop sites so you can have an idea of how to do so. This way you will be able to do this on your own and not rely on a 3rd party.

Ability to have as many components necessary

As previously mentioned, your medical website will have a lot of different components or sets of information on it. You will likely want to have pages for physicians, locations, news, resources, and assets so be sure your CMS offers the ability to have many components. The ability to have a lot of components and keep the information organized is not something that comes with a typical template site which is why when designing a website in healthcare you want to make sure your website is custom-tailored to what your medical practice needs.

Asset management (Images, PDFs, videos)

Asset management for websites just basically means you have an easy way to upload and change out different media for your website. It’s similar to updating content on a site but more targeted to files rather than text-based content. You’ll need an easy way to update, change out, and add different images, PDFs and videos if you have a healthcare website that uses these different resources. Be sure to have your digital marketing agency show you where and how to update this information.

Ability to integrate with other technologies & systems (iFrames, etc)

Almost all websites, but especially medical websites, use different technologies on their sites to enhance the experience or add in 3rd party tools. Contact forms, HIPAA compliance technologies, review widgets, and tools for careers are just a few examples of ways these are typically done on medical websites. You want to make sure your medical content management system will support these different technologies you’ll be adding to your site before you start the build if you plan on using them. These are usually technologies that have to be integrated by a professional and not just by a person who might be familiar with a website.

SEO tool integration

SEO tool integration on a website CMS is imperative and must not be ignored if you want to rank well for each page and the content you are working hard to create. Make sure your CMS at a bare minimum allows for an easy way to enter a full meta title, description, keywords, and image alt tags for content pages and specialty pages. Making sure you have all of the necessary information for successful SEO will allow you to rank well on Google and make your content relevant to those searching for your information. In short, this could be the difference between getting zero traffic and capturing leads through your site.

Google Analytics

Make sure your CMS platform of choice is integrated well with Google Analytics. This way you can gain insight into what marketing efforts are working and are not working for your website. With Google Analytics you can find out where your users are coming from (location), whether they are using mobile or desktop, patterns of use, and overall information on the user (whether they are new or a regular visitor). You can also find out the bounce rate which is imperative to know to make improvements and see behavioral patterns. For more information on setting up your Google Analytics account and strategy, contact Charlotte digital marketing agency E-dreamz ASAP.

Social media integration

Social media is now one of the main ways that companies advertise and promote their businesses both professionally and culturally to the outside. You pretty much never see a website now without social media links or integration on it showing more proof as to how important this is for potential clients, especially potential patients, interested in seeing your company’s culture and community initiatives beyond just the website alone. Social media links are expected to be either in the header area or footer of the website or live on other pages with cultural relevance like careers or pages specifically targeted for patients. Social media sites can also be a place for clients to leave reviews & testimonials of your clinic so don’t forget to check these often and respond to them when needed. Overall, you need to make sure your medical CMS platform not only allows for social media integration but makes it easy for you to update the links regularly when needed and add different feeds if warranted.

Regular technological updates

The internet is constantly changing and moving forward with different technological updates and trends. With that being said, you want to make sure that the medical CMS platform you end up going with stays on the ball when it comes to routine updates and maintenance to stay aligned with the constantly changing web standards out there. Here at E-dreamz our base CMS system, Echo, is routinely updated by our developers and engineers to ensure quality assurance. We go out of our way to ensure our website CMS admins are not only working properly but also are evolving with the most forward-thinking internet trends.

Here at Charlotte web design agency E-dreamz we specialize in medical website design, medical CMS, and medical web development. To see our medical website portfolio click here and to contact us today. For more information on our content management system, Echo, learn more here.