Last week, the Nielsen Company released data for the top 10 U.S. Websites, which included the average time a visitor was at each site.

High visit times for hospital Websites could quite possibly mean that your visitors are bored, not finding what they need, or negotiating inefficient content and navigation schemes.

Although such data is fascinating and is an occasionally useful metric for gauging a site’s popularity and success—for example, a Website that delivers entertainment content, e.g., YouTube—it is perhaps becoming outdated and potentially misleading.

For probably as long as there have been Website metrics and analytics, there has been a perception that the longer the visitor remains, the better the Website must be. However, that concept is increasingly changing, especially among forward-thinking Website designers and content developers. Why? One word: broadband.

Back when most Web users were using dial-up to access the Internet, Websites were designed with the limitations of “narrowband” firmly in mind. This often meant putting as much information as possible on as few pages as possible so that visitors wouldn’t have to click around to find what they wanted. As anybody that remembers the dial-up days should recall, a new page usually meant waiting for that new page to load.

Broadband, of course, enables even the most robust Web pages to load in an instant. Its expansion as the predominant way to access the Internet has had revolutionary effects on Web designers.

This begins with the influence on Web designers to be more daring in their visual and functional design (think interactive modules, video, rich media, etc.

It has also encouraged them build pages that are more narrowly focused since a visitor can quickly click to another page—and another and another and another until they hopefully find what they want (which is also hopefully what a Website owner wants: a conversion). Narrowly focused pages are also a hallmark of SEO best practices.

This is why a “good” Website may not be one that has the longest visit times; on the contrary, a page with the shortest visit times should not necessarily be considered to be a poor performer. Although true for many types of Websites, it’s especially true for hospitals and healthcare systems.

Hospital and healthcare Website visitors are presumably not hanging out at your Website to kill time, play games or watch videos; they are most likely looking for information, answers, appointments, etc. If your hospital’s Website and its navigation and content are designed properly and performing optimally, a visitor should be able to rapidly move through your site and conclude their mission quickly.

Add to Technorati Favorites

Tweet This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Analytics and Metrics, Best Practices, Industry Trends, Research and Studies, SEO, Web Design, Writing for the Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.