Award-Winning Site Designs: More Than Skin-Deep

Inova and St. Louis Children’s Hospital share their website redesign journeys.

// By Jane Weber Brubaker //

What guides great site design? And who defines what great is in the first place? We checked in with some of the 2019 winners of the eHealthcare Leadership Awards to see how they approached their site redesigns, and what drove the decisions they made. The answer is that there is no one answer. Each organization has to define what’s important in its own context, and then figure out how to build a site that reflects its priorities.

One of the things we found most interesting was understanding what precipitated the decision to embark on a site overhaul. What problems would the new site need to solve? In what ways had the organizations outgrown their old sites and the technologies supporting them?

Ashley MacFarland, director of digital communications at Inova

For Ashley MacFarland, director of digital communications at Inova in northern Virginia, the site redesign was a way to build a stronger foundation for the future. “We had a proprietary content management specific to healthcare, but I think we had just outgrown that technology and we were looking for a more agile solution,” she says.

John Odom, senior consultant, marketing and communications, at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, says, “For me it was trying to find the best combination possible of organizational goals, where those meet with consumer expectations, and then also where those meet with our brand, and how to tie all those things together into what our new site would become.”

Working with the right partner is key, particularly if you have a lean team, as is the case with many health systems. “It’s a collaborative process,” says Glen Doss, vice president of strategy and business development at Centretek, a full-service digital agency in the Baltimore area, whose clients include Inova and St. Louis Children’s.

Glen Doss, vice president of strategy and business development at Centretek

“They are smart clients,” Doss notes, “so they understand the need to create strong digital experiences, and they’re paying attention to what other organizations are doing.” Centretek and seven of its healthcare clients took home 12 awards in this year’s competition.

What does it take to be an award-winner?

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