I stopped by the SHSMD Annual Conference the other week and a quick glimpse at the agenda told me that people were vibrating with excitement about the potential of Social Media and Web 2.0. Every other session seemed to promise answers to the big question: “What’s in it for me?”

Always interested in broadening my perspective, I stopped by a couple of the sessions. Instead of meaty answers based on unique results, the sessions I attended offered bland and broad commentary focusing mainly on how the presenter’s presence on Site X had driven traffic to their parent site. “There has to be more than that,” I thought to myself as I shuffled out onto the San Francisco streets with the rest of the confused mass.

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The news has barely had time to settle in, but Google has officially released its Web browser, Chrome.  With Firefox holding approximately 15% of the marketshare and IE holding much of the rest, Chrome’s influence is yet to be seen, but if Google is serious about taking away traditional IE users and pushes it to its search engine users, we could perhaps see a marketshare of 5-10%, if not more, within a year.  And that could spell trouble for our Web sites, which often have to be partially recoded for browser-specific capabilities and quirks. Read the rest of this entry »

In the process of choosing a vendor, most often the RFP and vendor’s response concern the details of the program, service, and procedures.  But what many vendors and consumers alike forget is that in order to understand the vendor’s product, someone will have to educate you and your organization on using it effectively.  That’s when you’re usually assigned a project manager.  But smart negotiations and careful consideration will leave you with the opportunity to do what very few have done: choose the project manager you see fit for your organization and scope of project. Read the rest of this entry »

In the everlasting debate about a centralized vs. decentralized hierarchy of Web management, there comes the realistic perspective that our oft-small departments can be easily overwhelmed by thousands of pages of information, not to mention a seemingly infinite power struggle to produce more interactivity and more “shiney gadgets” for our sites.  Such advancements take time and resources, both personnel- and money-wise, and eventually we end up with a network of associates and colleagues we trust.  But finding those “angels in the outfield” can be difficult. Read the rest of this entry »

Do any of you suffer from the web developer bug?  At first, I thought it was just me.  I would develop a web site and once I was finished decide there were a million things I wanted to change.  So, I would take the time to make the enhancements, then step back and decide there were yet more things I could do with the site that were more exciting or more functional.  It’s a never-ending vicious cycle that I get caught up in.

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There isn’t much in my wife’s Personal Health Record that hasn’t been shared on the Internet. When she became pregnant two years ago she decided to use the web to learn as much as possible about the wonderful and terrifying uncertainties of pregancy. She participated in the WebMD message boards with other women, candidly sharing her difficulties and observations in a very public forum. The women that made up her community on the boards were from all over the country. They had different ethnic, economic and social backgrounds. Their perspective differences ran the gamut. But pregnancy was their common ground. Read the rest of this entry »

It might be considered old news now, but Google and Cleveland Clinic have teamed up to provide patients’ health information through a secured Google account.  After running a wildly successful patient portal with over 100,000 participants, this seems to bypass the hospital-specific portal and extend it to a patient’s private account.  Is this the future of patient health information?

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Alright, so I know I have a tendency to ask more often than tell/inform on the blog, but I like to provoke people’s thoughts and responses. In the future I might revisit my studies in usability - but until then, you’re stuck answering my industry-provoking questions.

This question has less to do with our websites that we manage and more to do with some of the internal processes that we all face at one time or another.

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In today’s corporate world there seems to be an emphasis on creating and maintaining a strong brand identity. Of course, as we all know, this isn’t a priority for everyone. We often get requests from doctors and nurses for shirts or other items with completely off-the-wall logos or additions to our logos. But sometimes it isn’t the big thing that makes a brand identity; it’s many small things that complete an already-existing brand identity. And for that reason, I’d like to introduce you to the favicon. Read the rest of this entry »

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I was in college. I ran across it in an old used bookstore and thought the title sounded cool. I remember standing there debating whether to buy the book, daydreaming at the very least some cute co-ed might see me reading it under a tree on campus and think I was hip. Three dollars and change later I was immersed in Robert Pirsig’s cross-country motorcycle quest into western values. Little did I know the book’s central question “What is Quality?” would then haunt me and eventually find its way into my work.

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