Get more from your web site.

For much of America, the Internet established itself as the nation's primary tool for communication, research and shopping. During the past few years, seniors have decided to get online as well.

According to the 2003 Pew Internet and American Life Project, 22 percent of American seniors now use the Internet, a dramatic increase from only 15 percent in 2000. More importantly for LTC providers, three-quarters of adults aged 30-49, who strongly influence the decision about choosing an LTC provider, are online.

While Web sites often provide the first contact between the LTC provider and the prospective residents and their families, much of the money invested in them has been spent on sites that are badly designed, poorly implemented, and based on outdated technology. They fail to address the needs of their intended users, and in general do not leverage the tremendous power of the Internet.

This is disappointing because the cost of building an attractive and effective Web site is about the same as the cost of building a poor one. You can greatly improve the marketing value of your Web site by getting acquainted with and following a handful of basic Web design principles.

A study of 50 LTC Web sites conducted in early 2004 assessed how those communities use the Internet. The communities included were all CCRCs--selected randomly from 21 states--with at least 200 beds.

The study found that 70 percent of the sites were static Web sites, meaning the contents appeared to change little from day to day, week to week, or month to month. Often called "brochureware," these sites are inexpensive and require little or no maintenance, but they aren't very interesting and offer little reason for a visitor to come back a second time.

The other 30 percent were dynamic Web sites and incorporated information about the day-to-day life of the community. Their content changed frequently because of updates to news, activity calendars, announcements, dining menus, and so on. As a result, they were much more interesting. In terms of site complexity, 72 percent offered a single list of links and a handful of supporting text and graphics. Another 8 percent were a single page. The remaining 20 percent were multi-level Web sites that offered several levels of menu options, more content, advanced features and were built by Web design professionals.

Some design guidelines 

Many LTC sites seemed to have been built in-house by people who were unfamiliar with the basics of successful Web design. Here are some basic rules for Web site design, along with a summary of how the Web sites in our study fared.

1) Get noticed, Do this test: open up Google (www.google.com), enter your community name and hometown into Google, then click "I'm Feeling Lucky," which takes you directly to the top-ranked site. Do you see your Web site or some one else's?

Fewer than 25 percent of the sites studied passed this test. Many were not even listed anywhere on the first page of search results page.

If you don't see your own Web site at the top of your list, go back and redesign your home page so search engines can find it and rank it highly. There are many things you can do to improve the ranking of your Web site. Visit www.spiderfood.net for some useful tips.

2) Go home, Visit every page in your Web site, and make sure there's a Home button on each page. Also make sure that clicking on your community's name or logo always brings you back to the home page.

The most basic rule of Web design is to always give visitors an easy way to get back to the home page. While most LTC sites do this, even those built by professionals sometimes provide no way to get home other than by using the back key. Every page needs a Home button, and it's a good idea for your corporate logo to serve as a Home button as well.

3) Stay on track, Visit every page of your Web site and look at the buttons or links used to move around the site. Were they clearly visible, are they consistent from one page to the next, do they always show you where you are in the site? If not, redesign them. Good navigation design is vitally important to a successful visit to your site. Visitors must be able to explore your site without getting lost. They should always know where they are in your site, how they got there, and how to get back to where they were. Several LTC Web sites failed to provide even the simplest navigation aids, offering only a jumble of links and inconsistent menus.

4) Design for low vision. Open your Web site, then sit five feet away from the computer monitor. Can you still read all the important text?

Although LTC Web sites are intended for use by older people, it's surprising how many of the sites were not designed for seniors. Many had text-heavy pages with small fonts, narrow margins and small hard-to-see pictures. A senior-friendly Web page is clear and bright, with high contrast between text and background and no clutter. For a good example of senior friendly Web design, see www.amvets.us.

5) Get it on paper. Print each page of your site. Make sure that all text appears on the printed page and is easy to read.

Good design also takes into account the look of your site when it's printed. Visitors often print copies of Web pages for future reference, but a surprising number of pages do not look good when printed--for example, text may run off the side of the printed page or shrink when printed, rendering it unreadable. Every page needs to look good when it's printed. If that is impractical because of other design considerations, it needs a "printer friendly" button that reformats it for printing.

6) Blow it up, Go to your home page, then increase the browser's text size settings (click on View, then Text Size, then Largest). All the text on the page should get larger. Check all pages to make sure they all resize properly

Text is trickier than you might think. Novice Web site designers sometimes embed their text as part of large graphics, which causes slow load times and prevents the text from resizing in response to changes in the browser's settings.

Another common error is to display text in a fixed size, ignoring browser settings. This is a real problem for LTC Web sites, because your visitors often have low vision and have set their browser to "large text" mode. If your text doesn't resize, your visitor can't read it.

Although 16 percent of LTC Web sites did not change their appearance at all in response to browser settings, some LTC sites handled text sizing nicely. United Church Homes' Web site (www.united-churchhomes.org) resized nearly all its text. Fellowship Square in Phoenix (www.christiancare.org) had a special setting for people who are visually impaired; this setting changed not only the text size but the background color too. The Seabrook (www.theseabrook.org) used "mouseovers" as a technique to enlarge text or highlight certain ideas when the visitor moves a mouse over an item.

7) Check your resolution. Change your computer's screen resolution to 800 x 600 and look at every page of your Web site to make sure everything is still visible. Then (very important) ask a dozen of your employees to do the same thing on their computers at home. You might be amazed.

Just because your Web site looks good on your computer, it may not look good on a prospective resident's old Macintosh or personal computer. Your Web site's pages should look good on any computer monitor's screen resolution (in particular, 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768), on the most common Web browsers (Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator), and on any personal computer or Macintosh built in the past eight years.

8) Squash your bugs. Find out when the last time was that anyone carefully reviewed every word, every phone number, and every link on your Web site. If it's been more than three months, you're overdue.

Frankly, the number of obvious errors in sites is shocking. Nearly a quarter of the 50 sites studied had obvious typographical errors, many right on the home page. One announced proudly on their home page that they offered "assisited living." Some sites had dead links, where clicking on the link resulted in a "page not found" or "bad link" error. Some pages had missing pictures. And incredibly, one site actually had a "Contact us by completing the form below" link on the home page, but no form appeared.

Sadly, a few of the sites left the impression that someone built the site as a project but then lost interest. In some cases, the pages were so far out of date that it was clear nobody had reviewed the site in years. The record for most outdated page was set by one Web site that proudly displayed their organization's tax return--from 1997.

Jeff Pepper is the founder and president of Touchtown Inc. (wwwhq.touchtown.us), a leading provider of Web sites and senior-friendly software to the LTC industry. He can be reached at [phone] or via email at [e-mail].