Medical School Website Design Agency: Best Practices and Philosophy

Before starting a website design project, our agency begins by understanding the medical tradition and educational philosophy the institution represents. Allopathic, osteopathic, naturopathic and chiropractic traditions approach health and healing differently, but each raises an essential question: how can we best serve the patient while avoiding harm?

Questions and themes we explore during discovery:

1. Prevention and individualized care.
2. The body’s capacity for repair and recovery.
3. The interplay of structural, biochemical, neurological and psychological processes.
4. The relationship between structure and function.
5. The whole patient, including individual circumstances and participation in treatment.
6. Underlying causes alongside symptoms.

Medical traditions interpret these principles differently and place varying degrees of emphasis on each. Allopathic medicine (MD) emphasizes evidence-based diagnosis, prevention and treatment using established biomedical science. Osteopathic medicine (DO) shares the biomedical foundation of conventional medicine, with additional emphasis on the musculoskeletal system and osteopathic manipulative treatment. Naturopathic medicine emphasizes natural approaches, prevention and the body’s self-healing capacity, though the evidence supporting individual practices varies considerably. Chiropractic medicine emphasizes the relationship between the musculoskeletal system and health, particularly the diagnosis and treatment of musculoskeletal conditions.

A medical school’s website should do more than explain its curriculum. It should make the school’s educational philosophy tangible, differentiate its approach to medical education and help the right applicants see why they belong there. A school that emphasizes biomedical discovery should make its research, labs and scientific mentorship tangible. A school that emphasizes osteopathic medicine should clearly communicate its distinctive approach to medical education and patient care. A school that emphasizes community health should show how students learn and serve within those communities. The design, content, information architecture and visual storytelling should reinforce the school’s educational identity.

Below, we look at three institutions that translated their institutional ethos into high-performance digital ecosystems.

Kansas City University College of Osteopathic Medicine

Founded in 1916, Kansas City University (KCU) is one of the oldest osteopathic medical universities in the US and one of the largest medical schools in Missouri. With 13 new osteopathic schools opening up in the next 2 years and peers stepping up their efforts,  KCU turned to Elliance to bolster its leadership role and outsmart the competition.  Its website had grown but lacked a clear point-of-view and had limited visibility on Google and AI engines.

Elliance Recommendation:  
Elliance’s recommended approach was shaped by four insights about prospective medical students. First, they are digital natives glued to their mobile devices. Second, they heavily use Google and AI discovery engines to explore their educational options. Third, they want to know in advance if the enrolled students and alumni were satisfied by their medical school experience. Fourth, as a lingering effect of COVID-19, prospective students living in the Midwest tend to have a strong preference to attend graduate medical school in the Midwest. 

Keeping these insights in mind, Elliance recommended replacing the large osteopathic medical school website with a lean, mobile-first, SEO-powered, AI-discoverable microsite that distills the argument for KCU into as few pages as necessary. We further recommended creating a blog which would house their amazing student, alumni and faculty stories and achievements. These stories would help prospective students evaluate KCU while strengthening its organic search visibility and potential to surface in AI-generated answers.

Homepage:

Blog:

Impact:

Two months after the osteopathic medical school website and blog were launched, KCU saw a 40% improvement in traffic growth to the microsite and blog. For many Missouri and Midwest related keyword variations KCU is  now ranked on Google Page 1. In addition, they are marching towards Google page one for reputation keywords like “Top Osteopathic Schools in the Midwest”. Furthermore, they have started seeing improvements in various osteopathic specialty area keywords for which they were simply not ranked for before. 

Now if prospective medical students search for anything related to osteopathic medical school in Missouri and the Midwest, they can find Kansas City University on the first page of search results. And once they get to the website they are able to quickly access  the most important information they need to make their decision. This includes class profile, featured alumni, faculty spotlights, residency match rates, and a streamlined application process. 

New York Chiropractic College

Before becoming the Northeast College of Health Sciences, NY Chiropractic College was a holistic health college offering programs in Chiropractic, Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine, and Health Sciences and Education located in pristine Seneca Falls. Our engagement began by rebranding the college, and relaunching the enrollment campaigns. See the details of our brand work here. We proceeded to reimagine and redesign their website.

NYCC’s website didn’t reflect the holistic nature of health and healing that the College taught. Just as the body functions best when its systems are integrated and aligned, a college’s digital presence must support clarity, accessibility, and well-being for those who engage with it. Our redesign was motivated by the need to create a site that flows intuitively, communicates the full spectrum of the College’s programs, and fosters an experience that is as nurturing, coherent, and integrated as the care the College trains its students to provide. In short, the redesign was an attempt to return the website to something more organic, human, and alive.

Homepage: Intentionally right, tight and bright.

Chiropractic College page: Warm, welcoming and professional.

Doctor of Chiropractic Program Page: An enrollment conversion machine.

Join the Healthful Life Movement Page: A calling to heal pain holistically and apply science to meet body’s own intelligence.

Impact:

NY Chiropractic College enrollment had plateaued for half a decade. Our new brand, website and enrollment campaigns unleashed a 40% growth in enrollment which thrilled the college president, his cabinet and the trustees.

Southwest College for Naturopathic Medicine

Elliance is proud to launch the first responsive website for naturopathic medicine in North America for Southwest College for Naturopathic Medicine (SCNM) (now Sonoran University of Health Sciences). By outsmarting the competition and with its history of firsts, SCNM has once again proven that it is indeed the most innovative college for naturopathic medicine.

The entire process of launching the website took almost one year, the first four being spent on articulating their new brand position: “Simply Inspiring”. Our interviews with SCNM faculty, students and patients made us realize that SCNM is a storehouse of inspiring stories of patients being healed by craft-minded Naturopathic Doctors. We also met a wide array of alumni who were respectable leaders living lives as NDs, as researchers for Nutraceuticals, as authors of groundbreaking work in Naturopathic healing, and as members of integrative medicine practices.

The new website is the first expression of the new brand position and comprises two parts. 

Homepage of the school.

Homepage of the community facing medical center.

As part of the brand rollout, Elliance also strengthened the SCNM recruiting presentations and redesigned its SCNM viewbook. All the new marketing touch points were inspired by their new brand position.

Best Practices for Designing a Medical School Website

As the digital soul of a medical school, design your website for “Wow”, not just a “Yes”.

Differentiate before you design:

1. Know your brand and speak with your brand voice.
2. Lead with educational distinction and philosophy.
3. Merchandise hope. Tell stories.

Make the educational experience tangible:

1. Show how the curriculum works.
2. Celebrate faculty expertise and research.
3. Tell authentic student and alumni stories.
4. Demonstrate clinical training and student support.

Design around the student journey:

1. Make admissions requirements and next steps easy to find.
2. Show what makes the student experience distinctive.
3. Show “a day in the life of a student”, mentorship and wellness.

Engineer for discovery:

1. Create clear, useful program pages that answer prospective students’ questions.
2. Engineer for discovery on Google and AI discovery engines.
3. Apply metadata, schema and content hierarchy.
4. Make faculty expertise, research and clinical experiences easy to discover.

Build for People and Performance:

1. Use authentic photos and videos.
2. Design for mobile usability and accessibility.
3. Build on a secure and easy-to-maintain, easy-to-govern CMS platform.

Learn more about our higher education marketing, medical website redesign and inbound marketing services and consider partnering with us to grow your enrollment and reputation for your medical school.