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Keep Your Website Updated with This Trick

Countless professionals fail to update their websites, and this can be a poor reflection on a practice. However, there are simple tools you can add to your site that will help keep pace with technology. The best part is that many of these tools are free, and one of the most appreciated by viewers is a dynamic driving directions feature. This helps potential clients or patients get a great sense of your location, and how to navigate there.

While most websites include an address on their contact page, adding driving directions gives greater ease to people trying to find your practice. Utilizing Google, explicit driving directions can now be easily added to your website, allowing potential clients to simply type in their starting address and generate turn by turn directions.

How to Add the Driving Directions Feature:

First, visit the ‘Google Driving Directions’ gadget page here

Once at this page, click on the button that says, “Add to your webpage”. A new page will open with a short form that you can fill out to modify your gadget. For the most part the default settings are fine, but you can customize the title to be the name of your practice, select different colors to use, and even change the size of the gadget. MOST IMPORTANTLY: Modify the “destination” field in the ‘Gadget Settings’ area, and change it to the address of your practice. Now click on the ‘Preview Changes’ button to see how your gadget will appear.

Once you have the gadget looking the way you want it to, click the button that says “Get the Code”. A form window will appear at the bottom of the page. All you need to do is copy and paste this code onto your website.

Place the code on your “Contact Us” page. You can put it just about anywhere you want, although directly below your address is most desirable.

Most of us use content management systems with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), or “rich text” editors. You won’t be able to paste this code into a rich text editor, but here’s a cool trick: Open the WYSIWYG editor for the contact page and mark the position where you want to place the widget by typing “XXXXXXXXXXXX”. The trick here is that even if you have no coding skills at all, you can still find a bunch of “X”’s in the source code. Most editors will allow you to view and edit the source code. Look for a button or link that says “plain text”, “html”, “source”, or “code”. Press this and the window of your editor will change to show the actual source code for your page. Find the string of “X”s you placed in the code. Paste the gadget code over the “X”s and save the page. That’s all there is to it.

Now with the driving instructions on your website you have made it simple for your clients and prospects to find you.

If you are a current client, feel free to give your member services representative a call and we will be happy to place Google’s driving directions on your website for you!