Vet Hospital website

G'Day all...It's been quite a while since I was last here - been much too busy with travelling round the US, work, driving lessons and school etc. But since I'm here at work and I can't really do anything until the SQL server I'm trying to use responds, I though I may as well put something up here.

Anyhow, a while back I put together a website for my father's business which, while it worked, I was never really satisfied with. It was too easy for the hospital staff to break accidentally if they didn't close a div or something like that (fixed that by implementing a nice little browser-based WYSIWYG editor though) and I never really finished the database backend system I built for it either.

I recently started putting together an entirely new backend system that should work a lot better, but I decided to go back and redesign the website too. So here it is. It's still in it's early stages yet. This mockup is more about getting the layout right than anything else. I will be incorporating the Hospital's colour scheme etc later on (unless the vets decide they like the greyscaleness of it...), I'll probably add a little more animal-y imagery as well as the hospital's proper logo (if my dad ever gets around to emailing it to me). And while my backend system is in working condition, it's only running on my testing server at home so none of the links work.

So what do you think? I know it's nothing special or groundbreaking but I'm pretty happy with it. Are you?

I like it. But right now it seems like a nicely designed "made for adsense" website. It definitely needs a memorable logo. Also, you may want to decrease the margin of the whole thing from the top, it seems a bit too low for me.

Good overall.

too true. i skimmed over the post, but if the thread title didn't say vet hospital site i would think it's just an animal blog.

i know blogs are cool and are developed in a specific way to drive traffic, but there's more to a web site than simply getting a user there. you can't approach a rgular web site like you would a journal. you need to keep them there. if just getting someone to your web site was enough, in relation a business simply having a web site would be enough and that's been proven false an uncountable amount of times.

from a design perspective, it's very weak. you need to break this trendy 'blog approach'. there's a big difference between a full scale web site and a blog the same way there's a big difference between a novel and a journal.

sit down and write down the hospitals goals. examples would be like 'raising awaraness about $subject_x', 'proper pet parneting advice and faqs', 'different types of diets (diets for huskies for dog sledding for instance)'. basicalyl answer the question 'why does this need its own web site?' once you have that answer, figure out how you're going to get your message from the screen to the audience. a lot of this is actually pop culture research and interpreting the design elements that connect to your demographic baed on your reseach.

Derek, I'm confused. Where, in my entire post that you apparently failed to read, did I mention anything about a blog? It's not a blog. It's not intended to look like a blog. I don't do blogs. You also seem to have the impression that I'm trying a new thing here, that I'm experimenting to see if it will work, if I can bring in the customers. You probably didn't notice the link to the current website that we've been running for the past year and a half that gets over 10,000 hits a month. That's just over a third of the people in our region. And it's about 3/4 of the animal owners in our region (that is, our demographic). I'd say it's working pretty well, despite our competition having a comparatively prettier website.

I love that you think that pop culture has anything whatsoever to do with marketing medical services. It's really quite hilarious. You see, unless you're Jessica Simpson you really don't care which vet is the coolest or best-dressed around (if you did, my dad would certainly be out of business). You care about who does the best job.
Forgetting that for a second, I should point out that this website isn't really about marketing at all. GVH had a well-established client base long before we had a website, and despite there now being another vet clinic in the area, we still effectively have a monopoly in the area. We don't have to worry about pulling in the customers so much.

Again, this is an early-stage site. As I mentioned previously I am waiting on logos and stuff like that from my father. Once we're done it will look a lot more like a vet hospital website, I promise.

Anyway, I do agree with some of your points somewhat. We do definitely need to sit down and plan certain messages we want to get across - at the moment the site is simply a bunch of articles grouped into a few categories. It does need a bit more organisation.

sskhalsa, thank you for your constructive criticism. I do agree with you about the header part, now that I'm looking at it on my lower res (1024x768) screen.