Yesterday, I decided to take on an ambitious project. I would create 8 unique dental websites within a month. They would replicate the current trends of dental website design including the ones done by larger dental website companies such as PBHS.
The point of the project is to demonstrate how the difficult part of website development is not actually the building of the website itself. Rather, it is the creative element of learning about the unique dental practice, their personality, their struggles, and then creating a custom solution that would address those issues and leverage strengths.
The real difficulty is getting the best copy (the text on the website) for your customers, photography that build trust and assist in the buying decision, clear and actionable calls to actions, informative instructions and FAQs that answer the most important questions.
Stop Paying for Cookie-Cutter Websites
Stop paying for pretty website that look good at a glance. Chances are, that by purchasing a website template, you are buying one that functions horribly. I don’t mean that you’ll have broken links or is slow to load. Rather, a design company already has several templates ready and will just swap out the name of the dental practice with yours and sell it to you.
Think of it like this. Would it make sense to take the car engine of a Lamborghini and stick it into a Ferrari? They’re both great cars with great engines, but by purchasing a website that is built from a template, you risk purchasing a solution that is meant for a dental practice completely different than yours.
Here’s a great guide on identifying whether a website is created from a template or not.
Anyways, that’s not what this article is about.
Since I am building these websites, I thought I would go back to the drawing board and research the best themes to use and share that with you. Now, WordPress themes are not replicated websites. They are the general structure from which a website is created. Generally speaking, they provide enough customization to meet the demands of any dental website. Two WordPress websites with the same theme can have different templates and can end up looking and functioning in completely different ways.
What to Look For
While I’ll do my best to include as many relevant themes as possible, covering everything is impossible. If you have a certain theme in mind and would like to use it for your own site, great! This is a list of criteria to look at when considering a theme, in order of importance.
- Customizability
- Responsiveness
- SEO
- Support
- Page Speed
- Browser Compatibility
1. Customizability
Is your theme limited to one color, one font, and one type of page layout? Avoid it! Find themes that offer you the most customization. You want to be able to upload an image of your logo, set the color scheme to reflect that of your brand, and have fonts that are legible and sophisticated.
Because websites are such personal experiences, customization is our most important criteria.
2. Responsiveness
Today, mobile responsiveness is no longer a choice! over 65% of searches made on Google are done on mobile devices. You are going to want a website that will scale down with the device so that it maintains its functionality and usability.
3. SEO Friendliness
Will you be allowed to edit elements such that you are optimizing your website for search engines? Some themes don’t allow this functionality and this will severely hurt you in the long run.
4. Support
If the theme offers a support team, it can make a huge difference. Not only can they further help you with customization and unlocking functionality that you may have no known about before, but no theme is perfect and a great support theme will ensure that your website functions properly.
5. Page Speed
Closely tied to SEO, page speed is a user experience factor. The faster the page speeds, the less users will “bounce” out, the more pages users will crawl, and the longer they will stay on your site. This tells Google that your website is more valuable than the one getting less activity on it and, as a result, your rankings will go up.
Our Top Free WordPress Themes for Dentists
Our Top Paid WordPress Themes for Dentists
Conclusion
There is no singular best when it comes to a WordPress theme. It depends entirely upon what look you are going for, what functionality you want on your website, your ambitions with your online growth, and much more.
Use our brief list to take a look at what is available. If you have any questions, or if you have an idea of what you want but don’t have a theme in mind, ask us for free! We would love to help you out.
