Maintaining your dental website

Has your website ever faltered?

Has your website ever experienced a glitch? For instance, you may have clicked through a link and seen a ‘404 Page Not Found’, or a photo not displaying on a web page, or worse still your dental website has suddenly disappeared! So what can you do to prevent downtime and optimise performance? The answer is to ensure you are maintaining your dental website with the right support plan in place. Although this will add extra costs to your expenses each month, it will provide you with peace of mind and prevent a whole list of potential problems which can occur at any time.

But wait I hear you asking, what could possibly go wrong???
Find out more about monthly website maintenance >

Special features

Dental websites are more complex than they used to be. Nowadays they include special features to enhance the patient experience. These can be a whole variety of different interactive and non-interactive functions and effects such as animation, videos, online enquiry forms and even finance calculators. All of which need to be tested regularly when supporting and maintaining your dental website properly.
Maintaining your dental website and why its important >

Dental website hosting

Every website is hosted on a server somewhere in the world. Web servers also require maintenance and occasionally they require upgrading or moving location as and when the hosting company expands. It is also not uncommon to hear of web servers getting hacked into. I have witnessed websites that have been totally corrupted so therefore it is important to identify any abnormal defects or broken links otherwise your website will not operate as it should.

Try to avoid low cost hosting and choose a provider with a good reliable reputation. Ideally your dental website is better off being hosted on a secure server. This can usually be identified with https as opposed to http at the beginning of the url (domain address on the internet browser). This is not to suggest that you should stop maintaining your dental website as hosting companies still need to check all their servers and carry out regular tests  to ensure they are fully operational at all times.
Find out more about domains and dental website hosting >

WordPress

If your website is built in WordPress and you are familiar with carrying out updates then you have the opportunity in maintaining your dental website yourself. However, if time is limited and your website uses multiple plugins or adaptive theme coding, then it would be advisable to use a web designer who knows how to check and support your WordPress website. Free plugins used on content management systems such as WordPress are notorious for conflicting with other coding. If you have a WordPress website it requires managing and updating as often as possible.
What is better? HTML V WordPress Dental Websites >

Internet browsers

Most internet users or dental patients have access to several different PCs, Apple Macs and mobile devices. All of which run on different operating systems with different internet browsers. Your website may not display correctly each time Safari, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome or Firefox launches a new version. When maintaining your dental website with the right plan in place, your dental marketing company or website design team will check your site is displaying correctly on all the latest browsers.
How good does your dental website look? >

Backing up your website

Finally, websites should always be backed up correctly especially if you have more than one web designer updating it. There should be a copy on a remote server as well as a local server. Failure to do so could result in your design and content being lost forever. Don’t get caught out. It could cost you dearly.
Getting your dental website hosting right >

Who am I?

Alex Nicolaou is an expert Brand Designer and Creative Director who consults with marketers, dentists, specialists and entrepreneurs to grow their brands and businesses. Having 27 years of experience in dental marketing and a total of 39 years designing and advertising in all industry sectors, Alex knows how to make your brand stand out and communicate with your ideal target audience.

Alex has always been artistic, creative and passionate in everything he does. His natural talent enabled him to develop his career working on blue-chip accounts for successful London based advertising and marketing agencies. The skills learned and experience gained placed him in good stead for running his own business which he has successfully managed and directed for over 27 years.

His expertise has helped dental practices and other businesses to win national awards for design, branding and marketing. If you want your business to turn heads, he’s the man.

Read more about Alex Nicolaou here >

Dental branding & marketing

For more information call Alex Nicolaou on 01923 609770 to find out about making the most of your website marketing opportunities.
www.design4dentists.com >

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