“From the VitalSite CMS to the secure hosting, Geonetric helped us build an impressive digital presence that truly reflects our organization’s unique approach to care and focus on digital transformation. Geonetric’s design themes helped us get a responsive, inclusive user experience quickly and efficiently while still being true to our unique brand. The results are impressive and our internal team enjoys how intuitive VitalSite is to use. Most importantly, we trust our site is in good hands, and our patients’ information is safe.”
Debra Robbins, Director of Marketing and Community Relations
Silver Cross Hospital
When Silver Cross Hospital, New Lenox, IL, reached out to Geonetric, they had seven sites built on different platforms including Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal. The hospital was experiencing numerous security issues with their hosting, particularly with their online forms. As a healthcare organization, ensuring sensitive information is secure is a top priority — so Silver Cross Hospital turned to Geonetric and their proven experience in domain migration to help get the organization into a secure environment.
Geonetric’s expert project management and I.T. teams got to work creating a transition plan, carefully navigating the needs of multiple stakeholders at the hospital to ensure everyone was on the same page and comfortable with the migration strategy. Geonetric copied one site at a time, making all necessary updates to the platform. Then, each site underwent thorough testing by both Geonetric’s quality assurance team and the Silver Cross Hospital team. In addition, 16 forms were rebuilt in Geonetric’s secure, HIPAA-compliant form builder, Formulate. The transition for each site was seamless, with Silver Cross Hospital’s users experiencing minimal downtime with the Domain Name System (DNS) transfer to the copied site.
Building on a secure foundation
With their sites in a stable, safe environment, the Silver Cross Hospital team and Geonetric then turned to consolidating multiple sites into one platform and creating a new, system-forward design and content strategy that provides a better experience for mobile users. Moving to a responsive site was a top priority, as their previous sites had separate mobile pages, which didn’t deliver a seamless experience to their growing number of mobile users.
The new site is built on the VitalSite content management system (CMS) and the organization took advantage of a pre-built design theme — created to help organizations bring their sites to life efficiently and effectively. Built based on decades of design, development, information architecture, and content strategy best practices, VitalSite’s design themes are responsive, fast-loading, and accessible out of the box, so Silver Cross Hospital was immediately brought up to date with a modern site that meets WCAG 2.0 guidelines. The selected theme was modified to support Silver Cross Hospital’s brand, creating a design that reflects the organization’s unique approach to care.
VitalSite comes equipped with robust functionality, including a sophisticated provider directory. Silver Cross Hospital was excited to move their providers into the directory on their main site, instead of sending visitors to a third-party site. This allows the organization to keep that valuable traffic on the site, brings inherent search optimization benefits, and gives site visitors a seamless, consistent experience.
Enhancing the user experience pays off
The intuitive information architecture, modern design, and focus on building an inclusive user experience are resonating with both site visitors and search engines. Since launch, overall traffic is more engaged, spending 57% more time-on-page year over year. Mobile Users are averaging 96% more time on page year over year. Bounce rates have decreased 7% year over year.
In addition to becoming more accessible for users, the site is also more accessible to search engines, seeing a 66% increase in top 10 organic keywords across the site.
Location pages have seen a 14% increase in page views, 110% increase in time on page, and 10% increase in entrances. This illustrates that more people are going to these pages from within the site and more people are landing directly on these pages, meaning they’re aligning better with location-based user intent.
New, faster code has decreased the overall page load time to under three seconds, with some service line pages loading as much as 50% faster.
The organization is enjoying the new site and depends on Geonetric to monitor its hosting and ensure they are delivering a safe web experience for their site visitors.
Design Theme and Secure Hosting Set Foundation for Enhanced Digital Experience
