Built in, not remediated
Semantic structure, keyboard paths, focus order and contrast are decisions made while building. Bolting them on afterwards produces a site that technically passes a scanner and is still miserable to use with a screen reader.
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Healthcare
Nobody browses a
hospital website
They arrive stressed, usually on a phone, needing exactly one thing — a provider, a department, a location, a phone number. Every design decision on a healthcare site should be answering that, and most of them are answering something else.
What changes
Wayfinding, not presentation
Most marketing sites are built to persuade someone who's browsing. A healthcare site is built for someone who already decided to come and now needs to find something. Those are almost opposite problems, and the second one is far less forgiving.
The practical consequence is that the information architecture has to follow the questions patients arrive with, not the organization's internal structure. Those are rarely the same shape. A hospital is organized by department and specialty because that's how it's run; a patient is looking for “the doctor my friend recommended” or “where do I go on Tuesday”. Provider search, departments and locations belong near the surface, not three levels into a menu.
The second consequence is that the audience is genuinely everyone. Patients, families, referring physicians, job applicants, billing inquiries, and the staff who use the site as a tool. Most sites serve one audience well and the rest badly. Healthcare doesn't have that option.
Accessibility
A requirement, not a checklist item
Healthcare serves people with visual, motor and cognitive impairments at a higher rate than the general population. That's the whole argument, and it lands before any legal one.
The conditions people are actually on
Hospital wifi, rural mobile signal, older devices, one hand free. Performance work aimed at a fast desktop connection in a dev environment optimizes for a visitor who doesn't exist.
Text that survives being enlarged
A layout that breaks at 200% zoom is a layout that fails a large share of the people most likely to need the site. This is cheap to get right and routinely missed.
Legible to machines too
Structured data for the organization, its locations and its people. It's what lets a search engine answer “is this clinic open” without the visitor having to load anything at all. How Google judges this.
Search
Health content is judged hardest
Google classifies health information as “Your Money or Your Life” — content that could affect someone's health, safety or finances. YMYL pages are held to the strictest standard in its quality guidelines, which in practice means the things that let a reader verify who's speaking matter more here than anywhere else.
Named authors with real credentials. A clearly identified organization behind the page. Review dates that are honestly maintained. Structured data that makes all of it machine-readable. None of that's a trick, and on a healthcare site none of it's optional.
It also means the generic content strategy — publish volume, target keywords, worry about authority later — works especially badly in this sector. The E-E-A-T article covers what actually signals trustworthiness, and the SEO work is largely about making those signals real rather than claimed.
The work
Built in this sector
Both live, both clickable, both written up in full.
Boundaries
Where I stop
I'm not a HIPAA consultant, and I'd be careful with anyone who says they are and also builds websites. A public marketing site that collects no patient information sits in a completely different risk category from anything that touches protected health information — a portal, an intake form carrying clinical detail, a scheduling system tied to records.
For the first, I'm a good fit and the compliance surface is small. For the second, you need a business associate agreement, a vendor whose infrastructure is built for it, and someone qualified reviewing the whole flow. I'll tell you which side of that line your project sits on, and if it's the second I'll say so rather than take the work and hope.
Nothing on this page is a claim about care. I build websites. What happens in the building isn't my expertise and I'll not write copy that implies otherwise — which, for a healthcare organization, is a thing worth checking your marketing partner understands.
Straight answers
Before you ask
Do you only work with hospitals?
No. The two builds here are a regional hospital network and a healthcare marketing agency, but the same thinking applies to a private practice, a clinic group or a specialist. The scale changes; the wayfinding problem doesn't.
Can you work with our existing site?
Usually. Accessibility, structure and performance work all exist on a site that's already built, and for an organization with a lot of content that's normally the sensible route.
Who writes the clinical content?
You do, or your clinicians do. I'll structure it, mark it up so search engines can read the credentials behind it, and tell you where a page is failing to answer the question it's for. I'll not write medical copy.
Can you make our site accessible?
I can make it substantially better, and I'll be specific about what was fixed. Be wary of anyone promising full WCAG conformance as a fixed deliverable on a large site with ongoing content — accessibility is a practice, not a certificate.
Patients can't find what they need?
Tell me what people are calling the front desk to ask, because that's usually the list of things the website is failing to answer. You will get a straight read within one business day.