A Dentist Site With a Video Behind the Home Page

The site

A two-dentist practice in a suburban medical building. The first thing its home page shows is a video that fills the whole screen: smiling people in slow motion, a family laughing in a bright kitchen, a couple on a beach.

Over the video, in thin white letters, sit the practice name and a line about gentle, modern dentistry. Below that is an outlined button that says Learn More.

The phone number, hours, address and anything about booking are below the video, which on a laptop means below the first screen.

The video was the centrepiece of a redesign two years ago, and it looks expensive. That is part of the problem.

The inference a visitor makes

Someone looking for a new dentist arrives with practical questions:

• Are they taking new patients, and how soon can I be seen?
• Where are they, and is there parking?
• Do they bill my insurance directly, or do I pay first and claim?
• Are they open evenings or Saturdays?
• Do they see children, and what about emergencies?

The third is the one people rarely search for but nearly always ask at the front desk. Answering it on the home page removes a reason to keep looking.

The first screen answers none of them. What it does say is that the practice spent money on its website, and that the people in it are models.

Visitors know a stock clip when they see one. A kitchen that is obviously not the clinic tells them nothing about the clinic, and hints that there was nothing real worth showing.

The weight of the video

A full-screen video, even a short loop, is usually several megabytes, often more than everything else on the page put together.

On a computer the browser starts fetching it at once, alongside the text, the logo and the styles. On an ordinary connection the page sits half-built while the video arrives, and the first impression of the practice is a wait.

Background video usually brings scripts of its own as well, to start it, loop it and stretch it to fill odd screen shapes.

What phones actually show

On iPhones, a video cannot start playing by itself, and Android phones generally block it too. On the device most new patients will use, the centrepiece of the design does not play.

What appears instead depends on the build. This one shows a large, slightly blurred still from the first shot, sized for a desktop screen, with the white text over it.

Some builds still send the video file to phones that will never play it.

So phone visitors pay for the design without seeing it: a slow first screen holding a blurred picture and a slogan, with the phone number several swipes down.

White text on moving pictures

Text over video changes contrast every second. A white heading reads well over a dark frame and vanishes over a white kitchen, a white smile or a white uniform.

The accessibility guidelines most organisations follow, WCAG 2.0, set a minimum contrast between text and background. Over moving pictures, nobody can promise that minimum at every moment.

Thin, light type makes it worse, and movement pulls the eye away from words. Visitors watch the video and skip the line meant to persuade them.

The same guidelines ask for a way to pause any motion that starts on its own and runs longer than five seconds. This video has no pause control.

Booking details below the fold

Everything a new patient needs sits under a screen of decoration: new patients welcome, direct billing, evening hours, emergency appointments, the phone number.

A visitor who wants to book has to scroll past the video to find any of it, and many decide whether a site is useful before they scroll at all.

The Learn More button does not help. It does not say what you will learn, and it leads to a history of the practice rather than to booking.

A worked example

The practice's front desk kept a list of what new patients asked on the phone. Most of it was already on the website, further down: direct billing, parking, children, evening hours.

That list became the brief for the first screen. The redesign changed only the top of the home page and took about a week.

The video came out of the background. In its place went a wide photograph of the actual reception area, with the heading moved off the picture onto a plain panel beside it.

Under the heading, in dark text on white: new patients welcome, direct billing to most insurance plans, two evenings a week, and the phone number, which taps to call on a phone, beside a Book an appointment button.

The video was cut down to a short tour of the clinic, with each dentist introducing themselves, and moved to the About page with a play button and captions. People who want to see it now choose to.

What a real photograph does

A photograph of the actual practice answers a question a clip of models cannot: what will it look like when I walk in. For nervous patients, that matters.

One well-compressed photograph is a small fraction of the video's weight and looks the same on every device. Text placed beside it, or on a solid panel, stays readable whatever the picture shows.

The counter-case within the site

Video has a place on a dental site. A short clip of a dentist explaining a procedure, or a walk through the clinic, can reassure a nervous patient better than a paragraph.

The trouble is video as background: playing unasked, behind text, ahead of the practical information. As a clip the visitor chooses, with a play button and a still image until then, it costs nothing until it is wanted.

A practice selling mostly cosmetic work may reasonably make more of the first visual impression, as long as booking details still appear in the first screen.

Practical details first, real photographs, and video only when someone chooses to watch it.

What to change

1. Remove the background video from the home page.
2. Use a real photograph of the practice.
3. Take the text off the picture.
4. Put new-patient details in the first screen.
5. Make the phone number tap to call.
6. Rename Learn More to say where it goes.
7. Move the video to its own page, with controls.

Step four is the one that answers the visitor. The other steps remove obstacles; this one puts the reasons to call where the decision is made.

The same pattern, with the basics buried inside a feature, is in a restaurant site whose hours are in a Facebook widget.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.