Luckily we have search engines for people to find our site, but if they do not know what it has to offer, why would they come? No one is directing them there and telling them what they can find. How do you portray the value of your site and the services it offers patients when no one has heard of it before or knows that it is actually more than marketing fluff being pushed at them?
The role I currently am in consists of one person running the entire website: me. While this works for smaller institutions or websites that doesn’t have constantly changing content - I’m finding it difficult, if not impossible to not just keep things up to date, but initiate and ensure that all content is correct and as accurate as possible. I’ve been seriously toying with the idea of setting up a decentralized system of authoring that would have each specific service line (or at the very least, the large, important ones) make a person that’s actually within the service line in charge of handling that department’s web content. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been asked to do a little digging into what other hospitals are doing to present their quality indicators to the public.
Thus far I’ve only seen a handful of sites, Norton being one of the first and most prominent.
Has anyone else jumped ahead of the curve and gotten their arms around this beast?
When Google first arrived on the Web, it was generally welcomed as a “good thing.” The innovations from that company have been far-reaching, even shaping how some use and view the Web. I know that I’ve benefited from Gmail, Google maps, Google analytics, and of course the ubiquitous search engine itself. But not all of Google’s work has had a positive impact on me and my sites.
I am sure that many of you can relate to my frustration over the seemingly increasing number of people who complain that certain pages of our Web site are hard to find. In the last two weeks alone, I’ve had six requests to add links to various pages or sections to the home page. Two of them were already on the home page. And in every case, the individual looked one place, didn’t find what they were looking for, and gave up.
Between a recent topic in the forums and a brief email discussion with another member (webiScoper? webiScopean?), I got thinking about the two biggest points behind lofting an RFP: focusing your team to create a concise message that properly represents your institution and the its direction (or desired direction), and the quality of response(s) received. Who are you, and then who gets you?
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Syndicated content. We’ve had the discussions about whether or not it’s beneficial, etc etc. I don’t write today to discuss the benefits vs. drawbacks - that’s a discussion for another time, and another article. I write today to ask why there isn’t a better system of integrating syndicated content into your custom content.
I mean really, we spend a ton of money on healthcare content and CMSs (bought or built) which automate a lot of the day-to-day processes and make things possible which weren’t before. Why can’t this system automate a seemingly simple task: such as auto-tagging some content?
I have come to develop a great appreciation for the word “no” in this business. There are a couple reasons; the first and most apparent to me is due to the fact that of the three developers whom I took over for, none of them knew how to use it. This is demonstrated time & again in the legacy applications that I’ve inherited, in all the unfinished, grandiose project detritus all around - a lot of these fall in the “infinite amount of monkeys/computers/time” category, like “wouldn’t it be great if only?” (Yeah, well, if only.) Read the rest of this entry »
I’m as skeptical of concepts like branding as you are. If not implemented properly, branding becomes a blithe marketing strategy more closely aimed at consumer perception than experience. But when I sat down last month to sketch out my 2008 content goals, clarifying our branding elements and better integrating them into our web site’s content was high on the list. Read the rest of this entry »
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