Getting Off the Roller-Coaster: How Lee Health Transformed Its Website Management Plan

Taking an incremental approach to website development gives Lee Health more options to continuously improve its website rather than tossing it out and starting over when the technology becomes dated.

// By Althea Fung //

If you’ve worked in digital marketing long enough, you know that redesigning and redeveloping a website can be a never-ending roller-coaster ride. According to one B-to-B marketing agency, companies redesign their websites every three years. Maintaining a website can be daunting, especially in an era of rapid technological change, regulatory constraints, and evolving consumer expectations. Tacking on a redesign project every few years can strain an already stretched web team.

Lee Health’s marketing team needed to get off its website roller-coaster. The four acute-care hospitals in southwest Florida’s Lee Health maintained a static website — webpages made of fixed code that requires a developer to change each page. Static sites can’t be updated by content editors in real time, have limited functionality, and can’t display personalized content.

Ben Cash, CEO of Reason One

So when Reason One, Lee Health’s digital marketing agency, recommended a different approach, the system’s new product owner Stephen Barry agreed it was the best way forward. As Barry and Reason One CEO Ben Cash illustrated in their Healthcare Marketing & Physician Strategies Summit presentation in April, incremental change yields better outcomes while reducing the burden on teams and stabilizing budgets.

“Incremental change is an evolutionary approach instead of revolutionary,” Cash said in an interview. “Rather than burning down your website and doing a redesign every couple of years, which is what most people do, you evolve your presence over time.”

In this article, Cash and Barry explain how this approach ensures continuous improvement and avoids the pitfalls of the traditional “roller-coaster” method of periodic, large-scale overhauls.

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