Quick Announcements

Free Whitepaper -  4 Things you can do TODAY to help promote your Dental Website online and attract new patients.

Read our latest whitepaper here: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/gdw/assets/4_Things_you_can_do_today_to_help_promote_your_dental_website.pdf

Take our short customer suvey!

Answer all the questions or just one question! http://form.jotform.us/form/20947713933156  

We're re-doing GreatDentalWebsites.com and would love your videos

If you have a video testimonial you'd like to share on the new http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com (eta 1 month) please email Jeff.  If you'd like to be in our featured customers section, again, please email us - you get a free link back to your website.

New Features

Improved Video Tutorials

We've re-done all of our video tutorials and they can be found here.  They are also integrated into the relevant section of the admin menu when possible.  They are now more thorough, more up to date, and most important, do not have my horrible voice. 

Mobile

It's arrived.  Our sites already looked pretty good on mobile devices, but starting today they look spectacular.  All of our customer's websites' have been upgraded with a dedicated mobile site for visitors browsing on iPhones, iPads, Android, or other mobile devices.  This is free for all existing customers, but will be available for a small additional monthly fee for new customers.  We'll extend this offer through the month of July, then we will begin charging for mobile websites.  So if you were on the fence about signing up, act before the end of July to get a free mobile website.  Mobile websites will continue to be free for existing customers come August.  You can view your mobile website right now by viewing your website URL from a mobile phone.

Watch the video here

Simplified Schedule Appointment Form

In one of our recent updates - we overreached a bit.  And we heard from you.  Before we had updated the Schedule Appointment Form to look into your location(s) and automatically figure out what days you were open and only display those to users.  Well we got feedback from (3) of you and it was all negative.  So we'll rolling back this change. From now on the Request Appointment Form will show every day of the week (There is a way to still disabled days - contact us).  We figured it was better for you to receive an email from a patient requesting an appointment on a day you were closed then to have the patient decide to not email you at all.  

HUGE SEO Boost: Pageload times reduced for all customers by 41%

Everyone knows that Google rewards faster-loading dental websites with higher rankings. Because of that, we're always looking for ways to shave a few percentage points off here and there. Little things do add up! However, we recently made one change that floored us. We knocked 41% off of the time it takes to load your website. Read the full story here: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/news/pageload-time-for-all-customers-reduced-by-a-whopping-25/

Bug Fixes

1. Sometimes when editing site settings if you added funky characters you were unable to edit it.  This is now fixed.
2. Some minor theme issues were fixed for some customers.

Everyone knows that Google rewards faster-loading dental websites with higher rankings.  Because of that, we're always looking for ways to shave a few percentage points off here and there.  Little things do add up!  However, we recently made one change that floored us.

Wow.  We made a few minor upgrades and a few tweaks to our servers and when we re-tested we had shaved 25% of the page load.  This was way beyond our expectations and you can actually see the difference with the naked eye when you load up your website.  For most sites it will be a full second off bringing you into < 3 second zone.

Here is a graph of our test for the curious:

So 1 second faster, 25% reduction in pageload time.  Not bad for a days work!  This should give everyone a slight SEO boost across the board.

Quick Announcements

Congratulations to Dr. Ross Allen - 22 new patients in one month

Okahoma City Dentist, Dr. Ross Allen recently shared some good news with us: 22 new patients came from his website in January alone!  Great Job Dr. Allen.  Here is what he had to say:

I have been extremely pleased with the service, product and most importantly results from GreatDentalWebsites.com. I am a new practice owner and needed to establish a web presence to boost my new patient number. Our office website has been the most effective (and cost effective) means of attracting new patients. In January 2012 I received 22 new patients directly from my website and Google AdWords. This beats our internal/patient referrals and guerrilla marketing campaign. Jeff and his team have provided excellent customer services during our relationship.

All that for $588/year.  If you have similar success stories, we'd love to hear about em.  If you need help tracking how many patients you received, we can setup tracking numbers to help measure call volume, but its always best to ask every patient for specifics about how they found you.

Pssst - Did you know we're on Facebook?  You should like us!

Like us here: https://www.facebook.com/GreatDentalWebsites 

New Features

Rich Text Editor Upgraded

Improved Form Styling

Cool new themes

Refer a Dental Colleague and get FREE Service Credit

Have ideas or suggestions for new features?

Recent Blog Posts

Read all of our blog posts here.

• Warning! Cut & Pasting content from Microsoft Word into your Dental Website
• Why should I use Great Dental Websites instead of a WordPress system?
• The Importance of A Dental Website and SEO Presence
• Creating QR Codes for your Dental Practice's website - make sure to strip down the URL!
• 5 Things Dentists can do to improve Social Media Marketing Efforts
• Adding a link/icon to your Google Plus business page on your dental website

Special Offers!

Spotbookers

Spotbookers enables visitors to your website to browse your allotted time slots and request an appointment immediately. The visitor will immediately receive an email confirmation and the appointment details. The search is over. The patient looks no further. At this point, it is your office's responsibility to be in touch with the patient via phone or email to make the appointment official and put it into your office's scheduling system. Spotbookers is a marketing/capturing tool on its own server, which eliminates any security risk to your site or practice management system. Our analysis indicates that less than 1% of visitors to your site will complete an on line form requesting an appointment; however, 40% of visitors will take the time to browse available appointment slots. Spotbooker's helps you to provide better service for clients and increases the chance that visitors will book an appointment.

Our low annual fee of $89 per year makes this a great investment in growing your business as the cost will be recouped with just one new patient. But, for Great Dental Website Customers, Spotbookers will offer you $20 off this price. Go to www.spotbookers.com to learn more

Jeff's Comments
Unfortunately, SpotBookers cannot integrate directly with your practice management system. But where it may be very useful for you is if you have a block of time you like to keep open for patients, and allow them to schedule appointments via spotbookers. It may help you convert some website visitors who otherwise might have moved on, and even if you need to reschedule them, you still have their contact info. Second, it's only $69 bucks a year, so you don't have a whole lot to lose.

Any customers who take advantage of this offer should contact us and we'll assist you with integration.

New Features

1. Vastly improved hours/days open system.  It's now way, way easier to setup your days/hours open.  Plus the new system places nicely with the way Google expects to find your data!
2. Improved page load time for all websites by 1.6% - Blog post: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/news/caching-improved-all-dental-websites-now-load-16-faster/
3. Improved the aesthetics of the "pods" that appear around the site which show related content.
4. Made it easier to delete records while editing them if you please.  If you're editing a record, you can delete it on the same page.
5. Live online chat support now integrated into all accounts!  If you're ever feeling stuck live help is a single click away!
6. Dynamic Phone number switching - if you want to track how many calls you get via your dental website or from adwords campaigns or anything else, we'll help you setup "Dynamic phone number switching": A different, tracking phone number for each source of patients that helps you calculate ROI.
7. Pagecontent now on testimonials - embed testimonials from 3rd party souces like Lighthouse360, etc
8. New Themes - We've hired a new designer to make some awesome themes for us.  They'll be rolling out next week.

Bug Fixes

1. Smile gallery before & after gallery images are displayed with more variety in the services section. Before sometimes there was unnecessary duplication
2. Video testimonials can now handle the new style of youtu.be links (and anything else youtube throws at it)
3. Smile Gallery images always display at the right size now

It's time once again for our monthly update.  We've added some very exciting new features, improved search engine optimization, and fixed a few bugs.  It's also time to welcome our new customers, and thank those who resubscribed in the past month.  Without the support of our growing customer base, we would be unable to afford all the new feature development and new "themes" that we're creating for everyone's benefit.

New Features

Facebook Integration:  I've threatened it for a while, and it's finally here.  You can now integrate your website with Facebook.  Now every time you update your dental website, you will have the option to post a summary of the changes to your fans on facebook (and twitter).  So when you add a new FAQ, you're facebook fans will know.  Update a smile gallery item - your fans will know!  It's very simple to do, and we've created an instructional video (2 minutes) that goes through it step-by-step.

Embedded HTML Forms:  We've had requests from customers to allow them to add online forms, allowing patients to fill out information right on your website and then have the results emailed to you.  Not only have we enabled that, but we've found a free, secure (forms submitted via encrypted SSL) service where you can host them (www.jotform.com).  Again, we've created an instructional video to show you how it's done.

Support for Different Types of Dentists:  Some of our newer customers have been periodontists, endodontists, orthodontists, etc.  Unfortunately, our previous search engine optimization was designed specifically for "Dentists".  Now it is flexible and can be configured to whatever speciality you desire, giving you that extra boost on Google search results.
New Themes: We're still on a theme spending spree, and you can expect another 10-15 brand new themes to be released to the server sometime in the next week or so.  If the current look of your website is getting stale, you can change it instantly be "editing your theme" after you login to your site.
Smile Gallery/Office Gallery Aesthetics are improved: Take a peak!

Online Demo?

It's been a little while since we had a free online demo, and I'm considering hosting another one.  The idea is that we'd setup a 30 minute slot where we could demo some of the newer features, show some tips and tricks, and answer questions.  If anyone is interested, let me know and we'll figure out a time (or times) that can fit everybody's schedule.

Two-Page sites

A lot of dentists buy up extra domains to use them for the future and to prevent competition from acquiring them.  Most of the time they just forward them along to their main site, but very soon we're going to be releasing a new service called "Two-Page Sites".  The idea is to have just a welcome page and a Contact page that can be setup and SEO optimized to really dominate the google search results, especially for specific services.  This service won't officially launch for a little while, but if you're interested, you can become a beta user and get the service for free while we fine-tune it.

Feedback wanted!!!!

I'm serious, we only hear from a few of you.  What features have you seen elsewhere that you want!  What's clunky and difficult to use?  What bugs have you been silently suffering over that we are unaware of?  We want to know it all! Most of our new features come directly from your ideas, so for those of you communicating with us, keep it coming!

Dentists who wish to collect potentially sensitive data need to observce HIPAA requirements, and when using JotForm should consider these guidelines:

http://www.www.jotform.com/answers/4728-Are-submissions-HIPPA-compliant

A few new features this month:

1. New themes
2. Improved quality of facebook posts in the facebook integration section
3. Fixed some bugs (aesthetic issues with slide show, image uploading).  Hopefully, you didn't even notice!
4. A few random SEO improvements
5. Homepage Pods are now sortable!
6. Staff on the About us page is now sortable!
7. Forms are now sortable!

We're going to spend the next month or so on some under the hood improvements that aren't as visible as our typical turnout of new features.  However, these will make everyone's sites faster!

Future of SEO pricing

We're going to be changing our SEO pricing structure to a low monthly soon instead of a 1 time fee of $999 at the advice (ok, the demands) of our business manager.  She is convinced it's underpriced.  Existing SEO customers need not fear, you will all be grandfathered in - so no additional  charges.  Get in on that while you can!

Referrals

We give away 3 free months of service to both parties for referrals, so please, tell your friends if you're happy with our service.

You can view all of our dental website themes here.

In case you've forgotten how to change the theme, just follow the steps outlined in this brief instructional video!

Once we finish testing, we'll roll this feature out to the rest of our customers;  Stay tuned.

How to change your dental website theme:

What do you think?

Where would be without new features:

1. Editable Metadata! At long last and by popular request, it's here.  Our automatic metadata generation does a pretty great job with SEO, but we have had some demanding customers who wanted a little more.  So we've created editable metadata:
   
   A little window like this will now popup, allowing you to change the meta data to whatever you like.  There is a reset (and global reset) button if you want to punt and start over too!
2. SiteSettings is now way, way easier to make changes and understand what's going on.
   
   Way easier, huh?
3. Caching is now enabled for all sites.  This means your sites will load way, way, way faster.  Google likes this too.  This is all under the hood, you won't even know it's there (except your site will load faster for patients!).  Note: Caching is disabled if you are logged in
4. Small SEO tweaks and improvements
5. More new themes, and from a new designer!
6. New slideshow on the homepage (faster, smoother)
7. Some under the hood speed improvements (removed some unused graphic files and compressed some javascript to speed things up!)

In Beta (and coming soon)

1. You can now view your logs from within your website to see how many people emailed you via the website and when.have called you if you have Google Voice
2. Support for Google voice Call tracking numbers. See how many patients called you as a result of browsing your website! (Must have Google voice setup)

New Features:

Google Voice integration is being trialed on our beta server. Soon, you'll be able to see how many patient phone calls your website is generating in real time.

We've improved our CRM(Customer Relationship Management software) so we can improve communication with our customers

We're trialing a new feature that allows you to upload upto 4 images to the Smile Gallery. Currently, you are limited to (1) Before and (1) After image. We're considering doubling this

Enabled PNG Image
 

This Month's featured Product

Start marketing yourself on Facebook and Twitter w/ our Social Media Package.
This package includes:

Custom Facebook Fan Page
We'll create a full featured Facebook Fan page for you.

Custom Twitter Page
Creation of a Twitter profile w/ custom graphics

Social Media Website Integration
Integration of Facebook & Twitter directly into your website. Update your website - automatically update your twitter/facebook page and keep your fans in the loop!

A Printable flyer for your waiting room (yes, we'll do the work for you we just described) for patients w/ smart phones to connect to your facebook/twitter accounts and leave reviews
 
Special introductory offer: $399. (Price will be $499 when it officially launches). Please contact us if you're interested in this offer.

Feedback Wanted!

All of our customers pay a monthly hosting fee. We take this money at put it towards features and improvements in our service that we believe will be most valuable to dentists trying to market themselves on the internet. We're usually ahead of the curve, but feedback always helps out a lot. We greatly appreciate comments and suggestions from our customers. Lots of ideas suggested by customers often get added as new standard features for the benefit of everyone. If you have an idea, a frustration, or anything else you'd like to share with us, please email us with your suggestion!

Here is an example of how this looks to patients:

List all staff on the same page

Due to a customer request, you now have the ability to list all of your staff on a single page.  This will be the default in the future for new customers.  To make this change (and change it back) goto the "Site Settings" link in your admin menu and find the staffdisplaytype setting.  Then change it if you like!

You can now choose the homepage FAQ

Previously, an FAQ was randomly selected and displayed on the homepage.  Now, you can mark a specific faq as featured and it will always appear on the homepage.

Improved SPAM detection for contact page

Unfortunately, some of you have been receiving spam emails via the contact/appointment request form on your website.  We've improved the spam catcher to hopefully block these out.  Please let us know if this improves your situation if you were previously receiving spam.

Minor SEO Tweaks and updates

Some slight changes to the underlying metadata that search engines crave to boost everyone's performance.