Health Care Facility Manipulates Home Page To Engage And Direct Users Inward
Health care Web sites leave a lot to be desired. Users generally find a collection of digital soundbites that strike a less-than-flattering pose for the industry as a whole.
But Tampa Bay's Bayfront Medical Center, of South Pinellas County, believes the Web is just the place for its marketing and PR efforts.
The private, not-for-profit, 502-bed community and teaching hospital formed a campaign to create a community of better-informed health care consumers - and employed its home page to help visitors understand the wealth of information housed on the site's 1,000-plus pages.
Bayfront launched the site about a year ago with a catalog of data, integrating health care information dedicated to specific audiences within its community, such as pregnant women or cancer patients.
A physician-finder component allows users to enter search parameters, such as "specialty" and "insurance accepted."
Tagged as "Bayfront's Health Adventure," the site seeks to establish relationships within the Tampa Bay/Pinellas County community. It is not intended to be a "screaming advertisement" as is the case with so many other health-related sites.
CeCe Bowman, Webmaster for Bayfront, says her task is to provide answers to health questions from a source the community knows and trusts.
Additionally, the hospital wants to help its wired community understand that a more convenient and comprehensive service is available to them, says Bowman, who serves as a member of the technical team for the facility's recent affiliation with nine other health care facilities.
In constructing the architecture of the site, Bowman focused on providing real user information of value instead of a "bunch of links."
Emails From the Edge
Initial promotion for the site included a direct mail campaign using the "health adventure" theme that went to households in South Pinellas County. The site's theme is reflected in the DM postcard piece, which is a play on the "postcard from American's vacation land" concept.
However, with so much information available on the site with a reach well beyond its intended community, Bowman found it difficult to use it as a promotional tool for new hospital services and events. Without a "set schedule" for content updates, the hospital had no effective way to "train" users to visit new or featured content areas, Bowman adds.
Feedback from users also indicated most visitors were going directly to the search engine for specific information. Emails from around the country flooded her in-box, complimenting the site for its content, but not for navigation.
"The site is so large people weren't sure of where to go to find things," says Bowman. She admits that the site started as static brochureware, chock full of useful content that was difficult to locate in the myriad pages.
After a little brainstorming with colleagues, Bowman decided to use the home page as a 'traffic signal' directing users to new information and informing them of upcoming events and new features on the site.
While maintaining the integrity of the now-familiar "Bayfront's Health Adventure" postcard, Bowman added a scrolling, JAVA-powered marquee - a tool users could watch and easily click on to go to an area of interest.
A pull-down menu of features also indicates when content is added. For instance, if a physician pens an article for the site, Bowman adds it to the "recent offerings" menu.
Events, such as triathlons and "quick hits" about healthcare issues, constantly scroll in an attractive box in the upper right of the screen.
By highlighting the new and helping direct users to content of interest, Bowman has seen an increase in average use, which now is at an all-time high of nearly 8 minutes per session.
Meanwhile, statistics on overall usage climb monthly. Within the first year, Bayfront's site collected more than 1.6 million hits (equaling 102,753 users), with more than 200,000 recorded in January. The most active days are Wednesdays, according to Bowman.
Weekends, particularly Saturdays, are the major downtimes.
The majority of traffic visiting the site hails from within the U.S., of course, but Bayfront's Health Adventure has many users from Canada, the U.K., Australia and Singapore.
"We knew that constantly changing information would bring users back," Bowman says.
Now as users log on, they are greeted with a familiar image and notified of what's new, without having to click elsewhere and conduct a full-throttle search. (CeCe Bowman, Bayfront, 813/893-6889; http://www.bayfront.org)
Kudos for Bayfront
"Bayfront's Health Adventure" was awarded an honorable mention in the interactive public relations campaign category from sister publication Interactive PR & Marketing News' <netty.awards>.
The Web site also was inducted last week into the Smithsonian for its visionary use of technology and efforts using technology for the betterment of the community. The site will become a permanent part of the 1998 research collection at the Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Site Features Include:
- Physician Finder
- Job Postings
- Health News/Kids News Bytes
- Kids' Express