How University of Iowa Health Care Used Its Website Redesign to Rethink Its Content Strategy
A major overhaul of a website can have side benefits, giving marketing teams the opportunity to rejigger the way content is presented and standardize the process for creating it.
// By Wendy Margolin //
It’s not unusual for an academic medical system website to be constructed like a house with several additions. Writing and style can be inconsistent, and the site can be hard to navigate. Without a large marketing team with time to regularly audit and update the content, it’s nearly impossible to ensure patients have the best possible user experience.
A new website redesign is a chance to start over and reimagine how patients access care online.
Max Freund, director of digital and multimedia at UI Health Care
When the University of Iowa (UI) Health Care marketing team set out to redesign the organization’s public-facing primary patient acquisition website, they knew the project couldn’t just focus on aesthetics and site performance.
“We concluded that you can’t move everything perfectly, and you can’t clean up everything. We looked at it as a tech project and as a content strategy project as well,” says Max Freund, director of digital and multimedia at UI Health Care.
To narrow the content strategy project, the marketing team targeted the clinical content, which they defined as evergreen, informational content that generates interest from prospective or current patients. “We all agreed that marketing content that helps people choose us is the foundation of what we’re trying to do. All other content should be built upon that,” says Freund.
What followed was a thorough content audit, a repeatable framework for writers, and new ways to partner with subject matter experts (SMEs). By successfully improving the website’s usability and content, the team also improved their process.
Freund presented how they approached this massive marketing project and the lessons learned at the HCIC conference in Austin in November 2024.
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