Creating a Website That Works for Patients, Families, and Staff
St. Anthony Regional Hospital had been a Fusebox client for more than five years when they came to us with a new challenge: their website needed to be easier to use.
With a hospital website, usability isn’t simply about making navigation look cleaner. Patients and families visit the site looking for important information, while departments throughout the hospital rely on the website to accurately communicate their services, resources, and information to the community.
St. Anthony wanted a website that made finding that information easier—and Fusebox took the time to understand what wasn’t working before we started designing.
Listening Before We Designed
Instead of jumping directly into a new homepage design, we started by listening.
Fusebox met with 10 different departments at St. Anthony Regional Hospital through roundtable discussions before the design phase began. Each department brought a different perspective on how the existing website was being used and where it was falling short.
We talked through:
- Functionality departments were missing
- Information that was outdated or incorrect
- Challenges with organizing and finding content
- Ways to make information easier for patients and families to access
- Department-specific needs that weren't being addressed by the existing website
Turning Department Feedback Into a Better Structure
Once we understood the challenges, we began looking at the website from the perspective of the average visitor.
The existing information needed to be reorganized into a structure that made more intuitive sense. We developed a new sitemap focused on organization, usability, and helping visitors find what they need without having to dig through layers of content.
The goal was to create a website structure that reflected how patients and families actually think about finding healthcare information.
That sitemap became the foundation for the new website.
10 Departments. One Unified Website. Before designing the new site, Fusebox gathered input from 10 St. Anthony departments to understand what was working, what wasn't, and what the new website needed to accomplish.
Designing Every Page With Purpose
With the structure established, we moved into the design phase, beginning with a custom homepage and extending that same level of attention across the entire site.
Rather than relying on a single page template and swapping out content, Fusebox created a custom design for every page on the website.
That allowed the website design to accommodate the different types of information St. Anthony needed to communicate while maintaining a consistent visual experience throughout the site.
The result was a website designed around the hospital’s content and users—not the other way around.
Bringing SEO Into the Rebuild
The website redesign also provided an opportunity to improve the site’s underlying content organization and SEO.
Fusebox transitioned the hospital’s existing blog content to the new website, reorganizing posts into new categories and creating a more streamlined URL structure.
This meant the redesign wasn’t simply a visual change. We considered how the site’s content was organized, how pages were connected, and how the new structure could provide a stronger foundation for ongoing SEO.
A Website Built Through Collaboration
The St. Anthony website was shaped by collaboration from beginning to end.
The process started with conversations across 10 departments and continued through sitemap development, page design, content organization, and the transition to the new site.
That approach was especially important for a healthcare organization with so many different services, departments, and audiences. Instead of making assumptions about what the hospital needed, we listened to the people who knew.
The result is a website designed to make the St. Anthony experience easier to navigate online—helping patients, families, and community members find the information they’re looking for while giving hospital departments a stronger digital foundation.
More Than a Website Redesign
For Fusebox, a successful website solves the problems that led the client to seek a new website in the first place.
For St. Anthony Regional Hospital, that meant taking the time to listen, rethink the site’s organization, create custom page designs, and build SEO considerations into the transition.
And because St. Anthony operates in a healthcare environment where standard website analytics cannot be used in the same way as many other businesses due to HIPAA requirements, the success of this project isn’t represented by a dashboard of traffic numbers.
Instead, the story is in the process—and in the positive feedback from the community and the people using the new site.
A Better Website Starts With Listening
Your website should work for the people who rely on it. Fusebox takes the time to understand your business, listen to the people behind it, and build a website that makes sense for your customers and your team.