I start with checking our online presence with this website to make sure there are no inconsistencies. I then verified our business on Google. You verify your business information and they will send you a post card with a code to make sure you are truly the owner. It is very worthwhile having your business on FaceBook as there are billions of people all over the world that utilize the site. Not too many of our patients utilize Twitter so we don't bother with it. I also verified our listings on Bing, Yelp, and Foursquare which involves just a simple phone call with a code to verify. I don't bother too much with the lesser known websites that are shown with the online presence site. Being able to verify your business allows you to modify your business information easily, see what customers are saying about your business and able to reply to ratings, and see stats on how many times you were looked up. This does not take much effort to set up and it helps you avoid paying for other companies like Townsquare that can do it for you.
I do not have much training in website coding, but I made our clinic's website pretty easily using Weebly. You do not need any coding experience to make websites and involves mostly dragging and dropping tools onto a blank page such as text boxes or pictures. They also have wonderful tutorials on how to add other content (I added my clinic's FaceBook feed). You can also buy your own domain and manage it quite easily without using other hosting sites. We were hosting with GoDaddy and having another company handle our website, but migrating to Weebly was super easy so we could retain our domain name. I followed these simple steps and instantly had the new page I created live. I really enjoy having access to editing our site and making them live instantly as it can take a very long time for other web masters to edit it for you. Weebly has great iPhone/iPad apps to manage your site and offer great statistics on page views. Other sites like Wix and SquareSpace are alternatives to website design.
Next post I will discuss smart watches and all the clinical uses I use my Apple Watch for since they are becoming more popular.
