Developing a great health website

Oct/08/2008 03:02

Creating a great health website requires two things: great insights and research and the budget to do it right the first time. A lot of people don't seem to understand the process and think that anyone should be able to type some keys and presto a great website appears. If there is one area that needs more funding instead of less it is in website development and if you skimp on development you could wind up launching a website that doesn't meet business or customer objectives.

DTC marketers will spend millions of dollars testing and shooting TV spots but when it comes to the web more time than not the budget drives (limits) the strategy. If you are working with an agency and they don't have a process for website development then my advice is to run away..fast. Here are the steps that I believe should be used to develop a great website.

Step 1 Discovery

Just like in a legal case discover is a chance for the Web team to learn all they can about your product and your customers. When discovery is done right the people working on the Website should know just as much about your market, customer and product as members of the brand team do. If there is research that needs to be done with your online target audience then this is the time to do it. What does your target audience want to see in the website? What is their decision making analysis in taking action? What can we do to become aggregators of the brand? What are our competitors doing? A full competitive online assessment should be provided at this stage as well.

Step 2 Business Assessment

This is often the hardest part of the website development process. This is where you sit down and determine the goal and objectives of the brand and apply those objectives to the Website and, more importantly, how they are going to be measured. There is also an assessment of the brand at this stage with a clear understanding of a SWOT analysis along with anything that may change in the competitive landscape in the coming months such as new competitors or new indications as a result of ongoing clinical trials.

Step 3 Strategy Development

So we know what the objectives of the brand are (awareness, sales, etc..) it's now time to develop a strategy around those objectives. Formally define and communicate the business and marketing objectives, strategic approach and measurement criteria as well as an integration plan with all offline communications. I like to deploy an online brand book and Intranet site so different agencies can all share what they are doing. One more thing...as the strategy of the Website is reviewed it is essential that the site also be optimized for search engines (organic search). Failure to do this could cost you a lot of website visitors and make the people at Google a hell of a lot richer. Research from your online audience should be used here to ensure a great brand experience online.

This where you also want to review who is responsible for the website content development. While brand teams like to use internal materials it has been my experience that this should be done by someone who can write for the Web. Content should not be over an 8th grade reading level.

Step 4 Functional Requirements

This is where we define what the Website has to do in order to implement the strategy. Here you have to work within the IT environment to ensure that you are not recommending functionality which can't be supported within the Web hosting platform. This is also the time to get buy-in with legal and regulatory people on what you want to do so they are comfortable with the direction of the site.

Step 5 Technical Requirements

This is the part when you need to get IT people heavily involved. The technical requirement documents ensures that the solution you are proposing is in line with IT capabilities and support.

Step 6 Project Plan & Identification of Assets

The project plan is the master template for the whole project. This moving time-line should indicate deliverables as well as when approval processes. A lot of people are surprised when the get a project plan and find that the time-line is 6 months or longer but believe me a great website takes time and a lot of resources.

Step 7 The Creative Review

This is where your agency either shines or completely misses the boat. The first thing that needs to be reviewed are wire frames which are templates for the site minus the branding elements. A lot of pharma and medical device companies have corporate wire frames which have to be used to ensure consistency with the corporate brand. Then comes the part I like most: the review of the creative branding integration, how the site will look and feel, how people will navigate the site and the integration of digital assets. Creative review is often frustrating because it requires a lot of approvals from the brand team. Agencies can save themselves a lot of grief by getting buy-in from offline ad and PR agencies before presenting to the brand team. There is often a lot of competition among agencies and you don't want a presentation to the team only to have someone from your ad agency say "this is not inline with the branding". In the past I worked closely with someone who is now a VP at Grey named Mill and her insights into the brand were nothing short of genius.

Step 8 The build

This is where you agency gets to actually build the Website. They should provide you with a password protected site where you can access the build regularly to ensure there are no surprises. You should also provide access to some key IT people so they can give you input and feel like they are contributing to the site.

Step 9 Testing, Validation, QA

Your agency should work with IT people to completely test the site to ensure that it meets the requirements of the company (such as page loading times). In addition a usability study with your target audience can also provide tweaks that can add a lot of value down the road.

Step 10 Deploy and promote

Before the site if officially launched you should promote the site internally to key stakeholders especially salespeople. Let then know how you got to this point with a detailed roadmap and let them know that this is only the start that there is still more work to do, especially with the analytics, meta-tagging and message communications.

What I haven't included here are the 20 or so sub-steps within this process. There is no template for this, a lot of this has to be done as you go so not to waste time and money. When I approved websites expenditures before proposals were often no more than 2-3 pages but the information that followed in each one of these steps were usually 20-70 page Power Point or Word presentations.

I would not work with an agency that has no experience in health website development. There are a lot of things they probably would like to do that we just can't do yet and they may not understand the legal, regulatory and medical approval process and thus spend time and money on tactics that you can't use.

So how much money does all this cost? Again that depends on the development process you decide to use. If you just want a website and don't see it as an integral part of the business objectives than you can spend a lot less money and spend it on a party for the cast and crew of your DTC shoot. I get a lot of requests of for really good agencies that can produce great results and if you want a recommendation please shoot me an eMail.