Today, after almost six months of work, we flipped the switch on the newest iteration of thewca.com. Posts of this sort -- writing about your own work -- are difficult to write without coming off as self indulgent, and while I’m probably not good enough a writer for this one to be an exception, I wanted to share some of the thinking and process behind the project.

Why the change?

When we talked to people who visited our previous website and asked them for their thoughts, the most common response was a variation of “it looks nice...but I’m not quite clear what it is that you do.” We rely heavily on our website and broader internet presence to lead our marketing efforts, so we were looking at -- charitably -- an opportunity, and our CEO tasked a small group of us with evaluating and improving our web presence.

Without dwelling on what was, we came to realize that some of the well-intentioned decisions we made in an effort to carve out our niche in the market were perhaps too cute by half. The end result: we weren’t doing an effective job presenting ourselves as a wound center management company, and we were relying too heavily on the website to make a complicated sales pitch, while neglecting to explain our service offerings.

What’s our goal?

Ultimately, our goal for the website is to have the visitor contact us (call 888.484.3922!). To that end, we wanted our website to make at least the following clear:

• What we do;
• How we’re different from the Big Guys; and
• The value and experience we deliver.

Serendipitously, the tagline we’ve been using for years hints at all these things. We just needed to develop and expand on it.

“The Best Partner in Wound Care”

Yes, it’s a bit of marketingspeak, but it’s our ethos here and something we all work towards achieving. The new site was written and designed to highlight our belief and showcase the value of forming partnerships instead of simply landing clients:

• We provide flexible program models that can be tailored to suit the needs of each hospital;
• We engage and communicate with team members at all levels to ensure everyone is involved in the program that needs to be;
• We deliver industry-leading services that provide long term value to our partners and;
• We never lose sight of our primary mission: to heal patients.

None of this, by the way, is new for us (our Six Rules have been in place since Day One), but I hope we do a better job of communicating it than we have in the past.

One more thing…

I want to close by recognizing the team responsible for the site. Every aspect of this project -- concept and copy; layout and design; the media, video, most of the photography; development, testing, and deployment; blog posts, What We Did Today, press releases -- is all done entirely in house by WCA employees.

They made this project happen, and I’m privileged to work with such a great team.