Are Cheap Dental Websites A Bargain?
John, I’m a young dentist on a very tight budget. I found someone who builds dental websites for only a few hundred dollars. I want to save money building my website without sacrificing its quality. What are your thoughts on using a discount priced website builder?
G.C.
Hi G.C.,
Of course you always want to spend your money wisely, however, you might give some thought to what you will be getting in return.
In my professional opinion, just like the field of dentistry, creating websites for dentists is a task best accomplished by a pro — someone with long-term experience in that particular niche — e.g. dental websites.
Often, people who offer to build cheap dental websites are primarily interested in getting paid. Since they are not charging standard rates, they cannot afford to spend a lot of time on crucial aspects such as design, cross-browser compatibility, download speeds, original copywriting, SEO, or valid code.
Unfortunately, most, if not all discount priced websites, will contain text copied from any number of other dentist websites. The common practice of plagiarism within the dental industry carries some very serious legal implications, and frankly, is a headache that dentists do not need.
If the content has been taken from another site without the owner’s permission, both you and the webmaster could be held accountable for copyright infringement — and subject to paying thousands in legal fees and court awarded damages. At minimum, your hosting account could be disabled.
In the end it could be a hard lesson learned. You would have to absorb your loss (time & money) and start all over again — and have a new website built.
In closing, you may have found a reliable resource, though without seeing a few examples of the person’s work, I would be at a loss to critique them.
Good luck to you.
John
March 9th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
I would also consider if you are a small dentistry practice you may want to update your site periodically. A good solution is to use a content management system. A good website designer would be able to take any theme you want and add it to the system. Then you would be able to login and edit information instead of having to refer back to them when you want to change small things.
April 15th, 2010 at 9:12 am
You’ll find many ways to produce a good website cheap. Check out Microsoft’s Office Live program for websites. Much better is the custom website, which most dentists would get awesome results from.
April 27th, 2010 at 10:47 am
It’s important to consider search engine optimization when creating your website. You want the creator of your site to be familiar with what makes a site easily found. It’s a great investment, but you want to make sure you aren’t just paying thousands of dollars for a standard template. You may be better off finding a website that you really like and that was easily found in a search engine. Do not search your local competitors, but search a city in another state. Find the site provider and call around for some quotes.
April 27th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
You cannot just hire a designer because he or she is cheap, and likewise you cannot just hire a designer to produce a nice looking website. You must combine search engine optimization, and design.
It is important that your website designer knows how to optimize the title of a websites, as well as include keywords that you want to rank for. Having a website without an SEO strategy is not a solid marketing practice.
Consider having your website designed on a Wordpress platform, so that you can easily edit your own content. This keeps you from having to hire a programmer to do each little tweak that you may want in the future.
Make sure that you have a blog on your website as well, and update it at least once per week. Then ping your new blog posts using a website such as pingler or pingomatic.
All of these things will help maximize the effectiveness of your website, which will better serve existing clients and help you gain new ones!