Web Site Redesign for Plastic Surgeons: Standards and Cross-Browser Compatibility

For specialized physicians and cosmetic surgeons who wish to undergo search engine optimization and/or aggressive Internet marketing campaigns, the quality and development of your existing Web site’s structure will be the single determinant if you happen to need a ground-up redesign. Designing plastic surgery practice Web sites with Web standards in mind is integral to lay a solid foundation for search engine optimization. However, most developers still, to this day, ignore the standards and recommendations put forth by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). These developers choose to build Web sites with archaic principles such as nested table structure, Flash driven interfaces and inaccessible content that will ultimately work against you in the search engine results pages.

Avoid such developers and marketing firms that employ these techniques like the plague. When contracting your new cosmetic surgery practice Web site, be sure to request that the code validates for both (X)HTML and CSS and that it passes a manual review of the WCAG 1.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). While it is not known if validation will give you an actual boost in search engine algorithms, Web sites that validate for standardized practices correlate to being much more crawlable, usable and accessible. Such validation is also the hallmark of Web designers and developers that stay on the bleeding edge of the technology industry.

The importance of having a usable and accessible physician practice Web site is oft times not recognized. The following Web usage statistics (provided by the W3Schools month by month research and server logs) show the variable browsing patterns of the world’s Internet users.

As of June 2008 the most popular browser is Internet Explorer with versions 6 and 7 each taking about 27% of the market share. However, Firefox continues to add to its user base with a steadily rising 41%. Safari and Opera together hold less than 5% of users in the browser wars.

Why are these figures important for not only developers but for those contracting Web sites? Although the browser market is held by Internet Explorer, version 6 and 7 are extremely different from one another. And both of these handle sites very differently from Gecko based browsers (Firefox). Designing and developing Web sites from a standardized perspective enables developers to target the nuances in browser rendering, thereby creating Web sites that work flawlessly in each browser.

It is imperative that you test your site in as many browsers as possible or that make sure your physician practice Web site or your Web master follows standardized coding practices.

If your Web site “breaks” when viewed from any one browser consider each of those leads lost. Having a Web site that is inaccessible and cross-browser non-compliant is like letting money fall out of your pocket.

For more information about plastic surgery Web site development, cosmetic Web redesign and cosmetic surgery marketing, please contact cosmeticSEO or read through the many entries on our Advanced Internet Marketing for Cosmetic Surgeons Blog.

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