1.01 Just a simple web site . .

Once upon a time we volunteered to design a bit of a web site for our local veterinary practice. This has one and a half surgeries and three and a half vets. How much work could that be we thought!

Analysis
We started by analysing existing vet web sites. We wanted to see how they worked, how they were put together and the way they looked. To be honest, we were looking for an example of excellence among them so that we could clone it and save ourselves hours of work!

Return on Investment
We went looking for Veterinary Web sites. This was 1999. There weren't very many and some were suprisingly difficult to find. There aren't that many more in 2004. We persevered until we had built up a reasonable collection. The first thing we wanted to assess was the probable return on investment that each site was bringing to its practice.

Investment
Some sites had clearly had a lot of expensive professional time spent on their creation. Others looked like the hobby of an interested vet. One or two looked like they'd been put together by chance as the practice cat walked across the keyboard. Investment ranged from tuppence to thousands of pounds.

Expectations
What were these practices expecting from their web site? Did they want to improve animal care in their area? Sell more products? Attract new clients? Encourage existing clients to take extra services? In most cases it was very difficult to see any potential returns for the practice.

Positive returns
Estimating positive returns was easy. Almost universally zero. When sites had been online for a while there was a general feel of those piles of expensively produced practice brochures that gather dust in an office cupboard. Out of date information, pictures of staff long gone. Many sites proudly displayed a label "Site last updated" with a date two years or more before. The content was generally thin. You could read every page and come away with nothing more than the phone number and the post code (though some sites even failed to show one or other of these).

Negative returns
The clearest returns were negative. Some sites were so badly implemented that the lack of professionalism in their design could only suggest a similar lack of professionalism to be possible in the surgery. Today, with many more visitors having experience online, the effect of a poorly designed site has become more pronounced. People “know” what a professionally designed site look like and they are much less forgiving of an amateurishly produced site attempting to promote a professional service.

Exceptions
We found a handful of exceptions. Practices where someone, generally a principal, had discovered both an interest and an aptitude for promoting their surgery online. The most effective of these combined an enthusiasm for the internet with a clear parallel enthusiasm for the practice of veterinary arts.

The next stage
We clearly weren't going to find an easy solution to designing this one little practice web site. We would have to do some work - rolling up our sleeves we started by considering who the site was going to serve.

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