Website design for pharmaceutical companies

Many audiences, one domain

A pharmaceutical site has to speak to people with very different needs. A patient wants plain information about a condition and support. A clinician wants prescribing information, clinical data and ways to contact medical teams. An investor wants pipeline status and reports. A journalist wants a press kit and a named contact.

Mixing these on one page confuses everyone and creates compliance risk. The cleanest approach is a clear gateway and separate sections, with each audience seeing only content suitable for them, and with country-specific versions where rules differ.

Smaller companies have one more audience: potential partners and licensors. Business development teams scan a pipeline page, a science summary and a named contact. Make those easy to find, and keep dates and phase labels current, because an outdated pipeline looks worse than none.

Performance matters for global readers. Clinicians in clinics or hospitals often use older browsers and slow networks, so heavy scripts and large videos should be avoided on professional pages.

Structure we recommend

Some countries restrict who may see prescription product information. Where required, we add a professional gateway. Your regulatory affairs team decides what must be gated, and we build to their specification.

Regulation and review

Promotion of medicines is controlled. In the US, the FDA regulates drug promotion, and the FTC has a role in advertising generally. The UK has the MHRA and the ABPI Code, Australia has the TGA, and Ireland has the HPRA. Rules on claims, fair balance, safety information and promotion to the public differ among them and change over time.

We do not interpret those rules. Your medical, legal and regulatory teams approve every page. We build the site so that approvals are traceable: draft, review, approved and published states, with page version history. If you use a review tool such as Veeva PromoMats, we work with the approved content it supplies.

Nothing on this page is regulatory advice. Check all claims and structure with your qualified regulatory team.

Accessibility and global use

Pharma sites reach patients with disabilities, older adults and people with limited reading skills. We design to WCAG 2.2 AA targets, with readable type, strong contrast, captioned video, accessible PDFs and forms that work with keyboards and screen readers. Our WCAG 2.2 checklist lists what we test.

A global company often needs many language versions and country domains. We plan the URL structure, hreflang tags and content model early, so that adding a country does not mean rebuilding. Our international SEO service covers the search side.

Content and platform choices

Corporate pharma sites use heavy enterprise platforms, but smaller biotech and generic companies often need less. A WordPress or Webflow site with a strict editorial workflow can serve a start-up biotech well. A large company with dozens of markets may need an enterprise CMS or a headless setup. We recommend the lightest option that meets your governance needs.

Pipeline tables, publication lists and investor documents need to be easy to update. We build structured content types so that your team enters data once and it appears wherever needed, instead of editing many pages by hand.

Content governance deserves its own plan. Decide who can create, edit and approve pages, how expiry dates for promotional material are tracked, and how old content is withdrawn. A site without this plan tends to drift out of compliance within a year, whatever its design.

Project steps and price

1. Discovery callAudiences, countries, platform and approval workflow.
2. Information designSite map and gateways reviewed by your regulatory and marketing leads.
3. Design and buildWeekly demos, with a staging site for review.
4. Validation and launchAccessibility, performance and security checks, then launch with redirects.

Our public pricing is a $1,500 project minimum and $30 an hour. A small biotech corporate site is a modest project. Multi-country product sites, gateways and integrations with review systems add scope and time, and are quoted in phases. See the website cost guide and our website design service.