Medical Website Design

The development of an enterprise website is often an expensive proposition. Not only is there an extensive outlay of capital at the onset, but the regular maintenance of a website, once built and in use, is often the more expensive proposition. Various points of concern in maintaining a professional website include:

• Managing risks. Risks include the publication of wrong information or sabotage by a disgruntled web publisher.
• Slow time-to-web. Newly released information from one department takes a week or more to get published online. Any post-publication revisions also take time to process. Content that takes multiple-person signoff to get published takes even longer to process.
• High cost of changing site design, structure, or other underlying features. You realize your site design is not working but it may take between a month to a quarter to redo the design, not mentioning the financial cost of another from-scratch overhaul.
• High human resource utilization. Your IT staff or key personnel are kept too busy trying to keep the website up-to-date; there is no time that can be given to continual process improvement.

Managing static content on an essentially "brochureware" website can be challenging. However, the challenges are even more pronounced if an organization seeks to leverage its website to automate business processes. For instance, a paid elder care seminar sign-up form on your website that allows people to choose a seminar date to attend can lead to a nightmare if one of the dates is wrong. Without a system that allows for commissioning, signoff steps, and an audit trail, an organization is more prone to make such errors and less effective in rectifying them.

Another major concern in the maintenance of a website is the very management of an organization's content assets throughout their lifecycle. Some possible assets include:

• product and services details, pricing, and availability
• directory of key employees
• contact forms for multiple departments and individuals
• payment processing system for web-based invoice payment
• terms and conditions, privacy policies, HIPAA compliance statements
• press releases and other news publication
• job posting
• addresses of facilities
• logos, photographs, diagrams
• articles
• links to external resources

The various content assets generated by an organization originate from multiple sources:

• product vendors
• disparate internal departments such as Finance and Human Resources
• research and development
• outside consultants
• external partners
• government agencies
• photographers
• copy-writers
• operations
• site users

Gathered content assets may be transformed, once acquired, to reach a final stage by multiple parties. For instance, vendor-driven datasheets on a machine may have to be distilled by the customer service department to make it effective for the general audience such as the family of a patient.

Once acquired and transformed, content assets must be integrated and channeled effectively to a variety of audiences:

• Customers, prospects, stakeholders (External Website)
• Employees (Intranet)
• Sales force, suppliers, and partner organizations (Extranet)

The information, furthermore, must be delivered appropriately (e.g. key internal information is available only to employees and not customers).

CMS Benefits

No accidents. Errors are reduced as all new content and updates must pass through a commissioning and predefined signoff process before the system will publish it. The ensuing audit trail also provides accountability for all actions.

Job sharing. Instead of just an IT staff being in charge of updating content, whole teams can work to publish content. Additionally, the ease of use of a content management system affords all non-IT personnel to effectively utilize the tool.

Effectively manage published content. An organization can specify when content goes live and when it's deactivated. Review dates can be imposed so that old content can be archived or deleted. A CMS will also ensure that the website is structurally sound with no broken links to deleted content.

Fast time-to-web. With a CMS, the organization can respond quickly on its website. Articles, news content, or other content can be added in a matter of minutes instead of days as there is no "webmaster bottleneck".

Cost-effective site updates. If you decide to redesign the website, you do not have to start from scratch since the CMS stores your site content apart from the look and feel of your site. Thus, a site redesign may take as little as a week.

Version control. You control what content is supposed to be live immediately, on hold until a particular date, and what is old and must be deactivated. Moreover, you can have multiple versions of the same content. For instance, a press release with an attached document and one without.

Customer Relationship Management. An organization with a customer base segmented into multiple and highly distinct groups can personalize the website more closely for each group without having to replicate content. For example, the same information can be used for an Elder Care section of the site as well as the Rehabilitation section.