eHealth Symposium 2013: Creating, Innovating, Pushing Boundaries

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Eric Engelmann

Last week we held our 8th annual eHealth Symposium. Clients from all over the country came to Iowa to work together on pushing the boundaries of healthcare marketing. With a jam-packed agenda of topics ranging from the latest website design trends to agile marketing methods to newsjacking, clients left with brains full of new ideas, knowledge and relationships:

Heading back to the ‘boro.Taking with me great information, good memories and new @geonetric friendships. #geolive

— Matt McKinney (@MattMcKNC) April 25, 2013

Clients also received a healthy dose of Iowa hospitality, which consists of overwhelming friendliness, and over-the-top food:

Taking a lot of inspiration, ideas and knowledge back from #geolive. With all the great food, probably also bringing back 5 lbs.

— karamoran (@karamoran) April 24, 2013

It helps that we hold the event at The Hotel at Kirkwood Center, which is unlike any hotel you’d expect to find in Iowa:

Is this a Vegas Hotel? No, it’s Iowa. Really. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The entryway to the Hotel at Kirkwood. Gorgeous, fantastic coffee, friendly staff, and cozy places to hang out between sessions. Credit: The Hotel at Kirkwood Center.

The Hotel also happens to come with a culinary school serving up delicious meals every 2-3 hours. In fact, that’s how we kicked off this year’s event, with Chef Anthony Green, talking about ways to take an ordinarily mundane recipe, Caesar salad, and kick it up a notch or three.

Everything’s better deep fried: Chef Anthony Green kicks a mundane Caesar salad recipe up a notch by making it from scratch, then deep frying it or pureeing it.

Our clients are such good sports – they volunteered to help whip up a deep fried Caesar salad on TV in front of everyone.

You never know what you're volunteering for when your raise your hand. You might wind up making a deep fried Caesar salad from scratch.

Chef Green asks for a volunteer from the audience – did you know you’d have to touch anchovies?

Having pushed culinary boundaries, it was time to move into more serious material. Two days full of speakers and presenters covered topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Speakers and presenters covered a dozen topics showcasing the best in eHealth.

Geonetric experts doing what they do best: helping clients get the most from their relationship with us.

John Morgan, author of Brand Against the Machine, was our keynote speaker. He blasted apart conventions about branding. His entertaining and irreverent message was pitch-perfect, as Geonetric and clients work together to shake up the staid industry of healthcare marketing.

Author and brand guru John Morgan, our keynote speaker, discussed building brands in today’s social world. Fun fact that I learned: they have a pharmacy at Disney World. You’ll have to read his book to learn why it matters. *shameless plug*

Ben Dillon presented on emerging trends in our industry, and how they affect clients.

eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, presents on emerging trends in the industry.

Geonetric’s eHealth Evangelist, Ben Dillon, mesmerizes the room with that same sultry radio voice he uses in webinars. It makes statistics much more exciting!

There’s so much to learn that we used “Date-a-Geek” speed dating to make sure everyone had a chance to discuss critical topics around content, mobile vs. responsive design, and keeping up with the latest technologies and practices.

Relationships have to start somewhere. Why not start by speed dating?

With clients representing hundreds of hospitals, there’s issues that are unique to larger hospitals or rural hospitals. Our peer group roundtables let them focus on those topics, and learn what’s working and what’s not with peers facing the same challenges.

Peer group roundtables let clients with similar market needs and competitive situations discuss areas most important to them.

We’re renowned for our deep relationships with clients. One of the best ways clients get the most out of symposium is to spend some one-on-one time with their client advisors to work through the next year’s plans:

Clients love spending 1:1 time with their client advisors. And our advisors love it too!

We ended the program with a panel featuring Leslie Kelly Hall from Geonetric partner Healthwise and Gabrielle DeTora of DeTora Consulting, who gave us insights on the evolution of marketing’s role in engaging patients more deeply in their health, and how technology and data are fundamentally changing the role of marketing in healthcare.

Panelists Leslie Kelly Hall and Gabrielle DeTora gave an important outside perspective on eHealth.

@lesliekellyhall says “Empower patients and give them tools that allow them to do things for themselves.” #geolive twitter.com/HW_JoAnna/stat…

— JoAnna Brogdon (@HW_JoAnna) April 24, 2013

To add a little serendipitous fun, we hid Amazon gift certificates and gave out clues:

We have a winner! Congratulations Heather on finding the Amazon gift card – on your birthday no less! ow.ly/i/1XJI4 #geolive #hbd

— Geonetric (@geonetric) April 24, 2013

By the end of the day, with brains overflowing, we had switched to beer while playing darts, pool, and laughing at a local pub, followed by a good night’s sleep back at The Hotel.

Geonetric upstairs: Closed to the public

Sure, we’ll rent out the whole floor of a bar for a party. Of course we brought the deep fried green beans if you’re hungry.

Our post-Symposium surveys reveal that clients loved the event, learned a lot, made new friends, and are excited to come back! We’re already planning for the 2014 eHealth Symposium, to push the boundaries even further! We might even find something else tasty to deep fry.

Keeping Your Eye on VitalSite Search Metrics

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Michael ONeill

Search is the means by which people find the content they’re looking for. When it comes to a healthcare site, this might be a consumer looking for a doctor who specializes in their condition(s), a mom looking for the nearest urgent care clinic for her son’s earache, or a patient looking for the login page to the portal to renew a prescription.

While we typically look at search to assess how visitors find our site from big search providers (such as Google), understanding how visitors are using VitalSite’s built-in search engine is important too. Keep in mind, search doesn’t end at your doorstep! Understanding how your site visitors use VitalSite search can help inform decisions on where and how to tweak your site to respond to visitor needs and behavior by:

Diagnosing navigation problems
Identifying content gaps
Refining keywords
Refining navigation labels

Fortunately, VitalSite makes site search easy to monitor. Since it’s designed to work with Google Analytics’ Site Search reporting, the details of what visitors search for once they reach your site are easy to review. Let’s look at an example from a healthcare organization:

Notice anything interesting? I’m intrigued by the fact that four out of the top five search terms appear related to the client’s patient portal¹. If I saw this on one of my sites, I’d investigate a bit and ask myself a few questions:

Is the patient portal accessible/discoverable by searching the terms that actual site visitors use?
Are there clusters of pages where people tend to conduct these searches from?
Are there ways we can make the portal login more apparent to our visitors without having to search?
Do the search results for these terms bring me to pages that are helpful?

A few minutes of investigation reveals some promising areas to examine, and possibly improve.

Let’s take a look at another example:

Wow! Over 70% of the queries for the top ten search terms are baby related, and quite likely relevant to the Baby Photos module². Variants of “nursery” alone account for nearly 43% of top 10 search queries… and a little poking at this revealed the overwhelming majority of searches for these terms originated from the site’s home page…

The site’s home page… where there are no immediately apparent links to baby, nursery or baby gallery related content.

Is this a problem? Well, I’m tempted to say, “Of course!” But here’s where the art of interpretation comes into play. While I’d be suspicious of something like this and suggest a webmaster consider linking to the baby gallery from the home page, there could be valid reasons why they wouldn’t want to do this.

This leads us to an important point: use site search analytics to investigate, but don’t assume that every high-frequency search term reflects a problem with your site’s Information Architecture (IA) or usability. Remember, it’s just one signal of many, and you need to determine which signals are the most valuable to respond to at any given moment.

How to Track

VitalSite is designed to work with Google Analytics to ensure that site search information is captured. However, this functionality is not turned on by default in Google Analytics. If you work with Geonetric to manage your Google Analytics, we’ve likely turned it on for you already. If you manage your own Google Analytics account, we’ve provided instructions on GeoCentral (our client knowledge base) that outline how to begin tracking VitalSite searches in Google Analytics.

Footnotes

Of course, this assertion implies that “portal” searches represent site visitors who are looking for a patient portal and not an employee portal. This is something that would warrant additional investigation.
The assumption we’d want to investigate here is that traffic for the term “nursery” (all variants) is related to the baby gallery.

How Can One Quarterly Survey Change A Deployment Process?

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Dawn Cooper

We’ve mentioned that we take feedback seriously. When we ask clients to fill out our quarterly satisfaction survey, we’re looking for areas to improve.

Our last client satisfaction surveys identified a key area that needed focus: our software upgrade and deployment process. It was our lowest category – getting a 4.5 out of 6. Not bad – but not good enough for us.

So we’ve made some impressive improvements to our deployment process lately – including push button deployments. To put it simply: We’re building a lot of capabilities into how we deploy and upgrade VitalSite so that we can deliver value faster to you.

Now that we’ve used the new push-button deployments capability, we’re really excited by what we see.

For example, since we developed our push-button deployment process we’ve used it to reliably deploy two major releases and two minor releases, all in the space of a few weeks. All tested in Dev, Stage and Live environments. In fact, thanks to this investment, for minor releases the only indicators that VitalSite is even being upgraded may be the deployment schedule and the appearance of new features.

This is a huge step for us. Our ability to deliver new features to clients quickly and reliably has improved tremendously. Now, we can be more responsive to client needs. Clients can spend more time using the great features and enhancements we add to VitalSite and less time waiting for them to be delivered. How many of the software products you rely on can deliver on that promise?

Now it’s time for our next quarterly client satisfaction survey, and we’re all holding our breath in anticipation of the results. This is the first satisfaction survey since we introduced our push-button deployments capability, and we hope clients have seen the same progress in our deployment capabilities that we have. We’re excited to see the results!

CMS Extends Taxonomy to Public Files

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Michael ONeill

One of the new features we introduced in VitalSite 6.5 is a completely revamped administration for public files (public files are files available to visitors who are not logged in to VitalSite, such as images your administrators use in the content of your web pages). This change brings to the VitalSite content management system (CMS) many of the capabilities typically found in digital asset management (DAM) solutions.

At the core of this is a move away from storing public files in the file system in favor of storing them in the database and caching them to the file system when they are requested by a site visitor (for example, the first time a visitor views a provider page containing the image of their doctor). This change to hosting files in the database allows us to push public file management in a number of new directions, including:

Scheduled publications and archiving
File previews
File versions
Administration permissions
Public file search
Workflow – drafts & approvals

These are all great new capabilities on their own, but there’s one more change we made that has profound implications: we extended taxonomy to public files.

In the past, public files were organized using a standard folder structure: you created folders on the server describing the content, and uploaded your files there. This is the way people have worked for years, so it’s familiar. But it also introduced some unnecessary constraints. Perhaps most notable was the fact that a file could only reside in one folder. If you used the same image in two different sections of your site, you had to choose one folder to store it in (and remember which), or you created duplicate files and dealt with the resulting headache of managing duplicate content.

Taxonomy provides a better solution. With the extension of taxonomy to public files, you have the opportunity to create a rich metadata tagging environment for public files that is typically only found in dedicated DAM tools. In addition to the standard file type and module facets created by default for you, you can create new facets with rich terms descriptive of file contents, color schemes, review dates, and more. The sky really is the limit.

Once you’ve defined the facets and terms you want to use, you can browse your collection of assets by filtering by facets… even multiple facets simultaneously.

If you’re used to the old way of doing things, fear not: You can always create a facet, call it “Folders” and use terms reminiscent of folder names to tag your assets. Just remember that doing so utilizes only a fragment of the potential available to you with VitalSite’s new Public Files features.

One thing to keep in mind, however, is that even if a public file isn’t linked to or embedded in a VitalSite page, it’s still always publicly available (assuming it is published). Fortunately, you can use taxonomy and VitalSite’s Secure Files module to create restricted catalogs of your sensitive digital assets as well. These are assets that will never be visible to general public site visitors, but which you may make available to privileged site visitors who log in to a secure section of your site… say for a Board Extranet.

Have ideas for extending and enhancing the use of VitalSite’s asset management functionality? We want to hear them! Send us a comment!

Push Button Deployments: The Greatest Feature You’ll Never Use

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Michael ONeill

It’s kind of hard to get you excited about a VitalSite feature that you won’t click, open, save or interact with. And it’s kind of hard to build enthusiasm for something that won’t make your day-to-day work any easier. But I’m going to try anyway. Mostly because it’s important you know about something huge we just released in VitalSite 6.5.

In short, we’ve implemented push button deployments. This means we can now deploy a new version of VitalSite to websites by pushing a button in a deployment dashboard.

The Old Standard Deployment Process

Before we get to why this is important, let’s talk about the standard deployment process. Keep in mind, this process is not specific to VitalSite, or even to Geonetric. It is, rather, what deployment looks like for most hosted products without deployment automation.

Looking over the flow chart, chances are the words “fragile,” “complex,” “unreliable” and perhaps even “broken” come to mind. And for good reason. We all know that any process which appears so complex and incomprehensible is tragically flawed.

In the software industry specifically, a release process that looks like the above imposes all sorts of downstream constraints on the software, not the least of which is infrequent releases. Software vendors end up bundling multiple changes, features and fixes together because it’s difficult to get them to you. We call this bundle a “release,” and the act of getting it onto your sites a “deployment.”

Geonetric averages three to four releases a year, so we’re definitely doing better than most when it comes to delivering new features. Consider, for example, how often a new version of Windows, MS Office, or SharePoint is released. We’re far and ahead better than those products. But compare this to how often new versions come out for other software as a service (SaaS) solutions like Facebook or Google. These get updated frequently and most people don’t even know it. What we do know is that Facebook has about one minor release a day, and one major release a week. Google won’t go on record with specifics, but Matt Cutts admits an update to search at least once a day, and we track on average 500-600 updates a year. For search alone. It’s obvious we have room for improvement.

There are, of course, many more ways that a manual deployment that looks like the flowchart above will constrain the software. The point is not to enumerate all of them. Instead, I’d like to show you how we’ve addressed the problem.

The New Automated Deployment Process

We’ve changed our deployment process so that instead of a dauntingly complicated manual deployment process, it looks like this:

A big green “Deploy!” button for each client, on a dashboard showing all environments.

By automating our deployments, we can now deploy the latest code at the push of a button. Not only does this reduce the time it takes to reliably deploy to all of our client sites, it opens up some opportunities for us in the future:

Feature Releases: Instead of bundling many changes, fixes and new features into a few deployments a year, we could now push a feature or fix out to you as soon as we finish developing and testing it. Let’s face it, working software that isn’t in your hands is not good for anyone.
Continuous Deployment: This takes Feature Releases to the next level. We could deploy to production every time a new iteration of the software that passes testing, even multiple times a day. The gap between development and client feedback becomes much shorter, allowing development teams to be more responsive to clients than is possible when changed code takes months to put into use. In addition, the deployment system gets exercised continually, so deployment bugs don’t hide for months before being noticed.
Improved Quality: Smaller releases with fewer changes typically result in better test coverage and better code quality. Conversely, when you combine many changes together into one enormous release, risk goes up. Feature Releases and Continuous Deployments both mitigate this risk and improve quality.
Rapid Feature Testing: This is the process where we deploy a new feature, measure how it’s being used, solicit feedback, and improve it. We could do this in a period of days instead of the months it takes when dealing with quarterly releases.
Self-Service Deployments: With automated deployments, there’s no real need for a developer to be responsible for kicking off a deployment. It’s possible we could turn this over to project managers or even clients directly.

VitalSite 6.5 was the first release to be deployed using our new push button deployment capabilities.

While the release included other enhancements (we’ve included security groups, SEO enhancements, improved public file management, bug fixes, and more) the new push button deployment capability represents a tremendous strategic investment that has the potential to change the fundamental way we develop and deliver VitalSite in the future.

2 Powerful Strategies for Using Promotion Codes to Drive Event Registrations

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Michael ONeill

VitalSite 6.4 introduced a powerful feature: promotional codes. It’s been exciting to see how our clients are using them to promote their calendar events and drive revenue for their organizations.

So you’re probably wondering, “What’s the best way to use promotional codes?” Well, reach into your marketer’s toolbox and pull out two proven tactics: Limited Time Offers and Exclusive Offers.

Limited Time Offers

In the psychology of selling, limited time offers provide the consumer a strong incentive to act immediately, as they promote a sense of urgency that counters natural inclinations to procrastinate or forget.

VitalSite has a built-in mechanism for publishing and archiving promotion codes automatically on specific dates. By using this feature, you can create your promotion codes and start your campaigns with the assurance that site visitors will only be able to use the promotion codes on the dates you specify.

My favorite limited time offer campaigns include early-bird discounts to registrants who sign up at least two weeks before the class, and special one-day promotions to motivate registrations with the offer of a steep discount for acting immediately. Of course you can (and should) experiment and find the types of limited time promotions that work best for your organization and events.

As with any promotion, you’ll want to target specific communities, use the codes appropriately, and pay attention to the results. Too many limited time offers and your audience will quickly grow fatigued. Too few and you may miss out on revenue due to fewer registrations.

Exclusive Offers

Next to limited time offers, exclusivity is also a strong motivator for action. Chances are you have a number of opportunities to use exclusive offers to drive event registrations:

Direct mail – Identify a target market and send them a promotion code for a discount that is not publicly advertised or announced outside the direct mail campaign. Make sure to tell your readers that not everyone has access to this promotion code. Otherwise, the strong motivational component of exclusivity doesn’t exist and won’t work in your favor.
Social networks – Offer incentives for people to follow your organization on your social media outlets by periodically offering promotions and discounts exclusively through those channels. Not only can this drive registrations, but it provides your audience with tangible value for following your social media stream.
Organization blogs – Have mommy bloggers or doctor bloggers? A great way to reward blog followers while driving registrations is to promote relevant calendar events through these channels. Provide your bloggers with unique promotion codes they can offer their readers. Used effectively, this approach can drive registrations and readership at the same time.

VitalSite’s Calendar & Event Directory is a powerful tool that can help you contribute to your organization’s bottom line while helping with patient education, public health and community awareness of your organization’s expertise. In addition to the approaches indicated above, there are a plethora of other ways to use promotion codes (such as running combination deals, core SEO principles, and other approaches to marketing and promoting your events).

Cornerstone Health Care Launches Responsive Site

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Debbie Sproat

Cornerstone Health Care has partnered with Geonetric to take their Web presence to the next level. With Cornerstone’s rebranding and new content combined with Geonetric’s VitalSite and expertise, a new site was launched with an emphasis on the physician, location and service modules.

When Cornerstone started the project they only had twelve pages of content. Together, we built out their service line content to include a landing page for each service line. Cornerstone gathered information from the service directors and wrote almost fifty pages of service line content for the new site, which Geonetric then added into VitalSite.

With the power of VitalSite, we were able to cross-promote the Cornerstone practice locations and providers on the service line pages using SmartPanels. In addition, content from the press releases were added to the news module to allow the new content to be searchable.

Geonetric’s design team created a clean, engaging design for Cornerstone’s consumers and with the site built responsively. Visitors are able to view and enjoy the site regardless of what device they are on.

It was great to partner with Cornerstone Health Care to build a fun, exciting site from the ground up. It is always easy to work with a client toward a common goal when each team is dedicated to each other. Welcome to the family, Cornerstone!

12 Tips for Promoting Your Health Event Online

Posted on November 1, 2012 by David Sturtz

Events are a huge component of many of your marketing, health promotion, community outreach, professional training, and fundraising efforts. But would you know it from looking at your website? Too often healthcare websites include brief event descriptions copied from print materials, challenging navigation, and few calls to action that frustrate registrants on many healthcare websites.

Here are twelve tips for ensuring potential attendees can find your listing, have the information they need, and can figure out how to sign up for the event.

Enhance Your Event Content

Expand your event descriptions. Try to help potential attendees learn about the entire event experience – where it’s held, who will be attending, what they will be asked to do, and what information will be presented.
Use photos and videos of the event location, class materials, props, speakers and even highlights of the content.
Include feedback, quotes or testimonials from past participants. First-person perspectives can help potential attendees imagine themselves at your event.

Make Event Listings Easy to Find

Be sure events can be found by topic. Visitors to healthcare sites tend to focus on finding events around a particular topic, rather than browsing events on certain days. They are more likely to want to know when the next flu clinic is than everything that’s going on this Friday. Make sure they don’t have to look through tons of irrelevant information to find the event they care about.
Watch out for navigational dead ends and cul-de-sacs. Categories with no events, expired event listings, and lists of events with no calls to action can create a frustrating online experience.
Cross-link events throughout your website. Visitors arrive on your website in more places than just your home page. Make sure it’s easy to access information about relevant events from these entry points.
Link related events together. Make it easy to locate the best date for a particular topic, as well as support groups, screenings, or wellness topics relevant to a particular condition.
Promote events with social media. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even Pinterest can be great ways to share information about upcoming events. Use multimedia elements (see number two) to make your posts even more engaging.
Pay attention to search engine optimization. Page title, description, and properly-structured headings can help searchers locate your event listing.

Make it Easy to Take Action

Make the call to action clear and prominent. It should be obvious what someone needs to do to attend the event. Online registration, a phone number to call, or the fact that no registration is required should be among the most prominent items on the screen.
Let attendees sign up online. If you require advance registration, letting people register online just makes sense. It’s convenient for registrants and a timesaver for call center and event staff.
Follow-up with clear email messages. Always let individuals know the status of their registration. Don’t leave registrants wondering if they’re “on the list.”

Putting it All Together
We’ve taken all of these ideas (and many more) into consideration as we’ve built VitalSite’s Calendar and Event Registration capabilities. From robust, multimedia event content, to related event SmartPanels, to a fully featured event shopping cart with online registration, VitalSite is the best way to promote events on your healthcare website.

For more information on how to promote your health events online, check out our recent webinar Revenue Drivers: Improving Your Site’s eCommerce Capabilities on our website.

Exclusive Interview with Our Guest Product Owner

Posted on September 5, 2012 by David Sturtz

We work hard to ensure our VitalSite content management system is the best on the market. And we’re lucky enough to work with experts in many disciplines – not just software development. We routinely reach out to our internal experts to get advice and recommendations to ensure our software meets evolving needs.

For one of our recent development sprints we invited Casey Hansen, Geonetric’s expert on all things Google, to join the VitalSite team as a guest product owner. Casey brought a backlog of ideas for enhancing the search engine optimization features of VitalSite. I sat down with him to find out how it went.

DS: Thanks for being part of the development team this sprint. Could you explain which part of the development process you were included in?

CH: I was involved in the planning process and the daily standups to see how the product team works through a sprint and overcomes obstacles. It was eye-opening to see how all the different pieces affect each other.

DS: It’s a constant process of prioritization. Were there other surprising aspects of the development process?

CH: The biggest surprise was to see how something that seems simple can actually be quite complex. What will that change affect here? There? Across the product? What do we do if this happens? What do we do if that happens? When you’re the one with the idea, you don’t think about all of the details. The simplest little feature can have waterfall effects. It’s really enlightening to understand the process.

DS: One of the features that you worked on was an enhancement to encourage authors to provide good metadata for the content they create. How do you think the feature will boost search engine optimization?

CH: It’s going to help make sure that some of the basics are on the pages, that they don’t get left out, and that they conform to standards. In my experience, clients have multiple people putting content in and it’s easy for pages to get published with no metadata, or inconsistent metadata. This feature is going to help guide that process.

Continue reading →

New Geonetric Website – Our Turn to Show Off a Bit!

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Eric Engelmann

We get to celebrate client website and portal launches all the time – it’s a fantastic milestone as we work together with our clients to build the best in eHealth. The vast majority of our efforts around here goes to our clients, as it should.

But yesterday, we also launched a complete overhaul of our own website, featuring a number of innovative new capabilities and tons of content useful to our industry.

Specifically:

The site runs on the latest release of our award-winning VitalSite software – making it incredibly easy for our team to update and manage over time.
The new site is a fully responsive design that beautifully adapts to any platform: desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or mobile phone. Check it out!
We’re committed to discussing and promoting innovation in the eHealth industry, so we’ve provided a plethora of resources, all available for free to our prospects and clients (or competitors) to learn from, including:
- More than 20 of our free webinars for the eHealth industry, covering topics from patient portals to search engine optimization – all in video, podcast or PDF format.
- Dozens of articles and white papers on complex topics like mobile sites, how to promote service lines online and content strategy.
- Links to all of our client sites – we’re proud of every single one, so we put them all up there – as well as success stories and testimonials.
- We’ve also added lots of new content about the amazing experts on our team and what it’s like to work here.

Take a look, and let us know what you think.

Ignore Your Home Page

Posted on August 2, 2012 by David Sturtz

Last week Jonah Peretti, co-founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, shared his advice for Marissa Mayer, the former Google executive who was recently appointed president and CEO of Yahoo!:

“It is amazing how having a huge home page can be a curse. People start fighting over existing traffic instead of trying to make awesome new things that are exciting enough to attract their own audience. Marissa Mayer should exclude home page traffic from all metrics used to evaluate performance…”

It’s a great thought experiment. If the product you’re promoting – whether that’s a service line, facility, care provider, event, or simply information – isn’t enough to draw visits on its own, then putting a link on the home page isn’t the solution.

In short: if you’re still focused on driving traffic to your home page, you’re missing the point.

Check the stats for your site and, if you’re like most Geonetric clients, you’ll find that 80-95% of pageviews are for pages other than the home page. So how do you make the most of traffic that is distributed across thousands of pages?

Geonetric’s VitalSite content management system has a great answer to this question – it’s something we call SmartPanels. All content in VitalSite can be tagged, organizing it for navigation and searching. Using these tags, site administrators can efficiently show links to highly relevant content in multiple ways across thousands of pages. And because it’s all driven by VitalSite, keeping all of those links up-to-date happens automatically.

SmartPanels can be used to drive calls-to-action, promote care providers, highlight upcoming events, and more. They interconnect all of the non-home page content on your site, making the most of all of those pageviews.

Learn more about VitalSite’s SmartPanels in this short video, then contact us for a demo.

Improving Team Performance with a Clothespin!

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Kevin Reiter

I’m never short of amazed when I discover how simple solutions can solve complex issues. One of the main goals on Geonetric’s software engineering team, day in and day out, is to deliver value to our clients. That’s accomplished by creating really cool and useful features to enhance our software.

Too often, we’re so eager to add all those really cool and useful features that we take on too much work. It’s a good problem to have – but still a problem.

So as the team’s Scrum master I decided to fix this issue. I gave each member of the software engineering team two clothespins with their name on them. Each member was told to find two tasks on the board that they wanted to work on and attach their clothespin to it. They could not start on something new until one task was done – or in other words, they couldn’t move their clothespin until the first task was finished. The goal: limiting our work-in-progress. And the result: it worked. The clothespin helped us put a physical and tangible constraint on the process to encourage a desired behavior.

The approach is a bit of a hybrid, bringing in Kanban philosophy and practice to Scrum. By focusing on a reduced set of tasks, in our Behavior Driven Development system, we can know quickly if what we built works, and others can see it, rather than stock piling large sets of tasks that aren’t viewable or usable.

The clothespin can really be anything. It’s a symbol for the shift in thinking we really want: continually developing deliverable software. In a system where small parts are continually added, with instant feedback, this is possible.

From The Department of Redundancy Department

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Joe Olerich

At Geonetric, we build some amazing stuff. But sometimes, we put our engineering talents to use to break things.

In the last year or so, we’ve custom-built a new approach to redundancy for our entire Web hosting infrastructure. The idea is that we can hit the system with any type of failure or disaster and every one of our sites will keep humming along like nothing happened.

During that time, we have completely overhauled our entire hosting infrastructure to provide greater performance, security, and uptime to our clients. First, our design and configuration was carefully planned and implemented to include automatic redundancy from the get-go. We spent months selecting components and working with hardware and software vendors to find the right combination of parts. Then we tested in our pre-production lab. Once everything was finally in place this past spring, we repeated the tests monthly by gracefully failing the systems.

Everything worked like a charm.

But now we wanted to push it even further to simulate possible failures and disasters to make sure the entire system worked as planned even in worst case scenarios. Our team created a brutal series of tests on the new configuration.

And by brutal, I mean pulling plugs out of critical machines. We literally pulled the plug on our core switches. The secondary switches took over, as planned. We unplugged our primary Internet connections. The secondary connections took over the traffic within a few seconds. We pulled the Ethernet cables from our active database server and within 30 seconds our secondary SQL server had taken control and our sites were still online.

For the next hour we moved down our list of eleven tests – unplugging various cables and flicking power switches off. When we were done the sites were still up, as designed. But it wasn’t perfect. We did have a few seconds to a few minutes of transition time as secondary systems took over.

After the high-fives and chest bumps were exchanged, we identified a few areas that, while they worked as designed and failed over as planned, could be improved. Those few seconds to a few minutes are one area of focus. We’d like the failovers, even in a disaster scenario, to have no detectable transition time needed at all.

So next quarter, when we run our tests again, we have an even more brutal set of tests planned.

While You’re Asleep… We’re Testing

Posted on July 3, 2012 by David Sturtz

What does your sleep have to do with VitalSite’s quality? More than you know… It all has to do with our implementation of Behavior Driven Development (BDD).

As you may know from the Lean management philosophy, finding and fixing issues as early as possible is the key to increasing quality. On a Toyota assembly line, any worker can stop the line when a problem occurs. We wanted to apply the same attention to detail and rapid feedback to our software development process.

That’s why we recently introduced BDD to Geonetric. Behavior Driven Development focuses on defining the behavior of a feature and writing automated tests to ensure the software behaves as expected. Writing the actual code to add the feature to VitalSite comes after the test is developed. Sound backwards? It’s not – in fact, this process ensures every line of code not only adds value, but is automatically tested at the push of a button.

That automatic testing is another key piece of our BDD process. By testing features throughout the software multiple times per day – including over 2,000 tests that run each night – we can find and fix issues as soon as they happen. As you can imagine, the longer it takes to find something that’s broken, the harder it is to discover why it’s not working.

At Geonetric, quality has truly become a part of each step of our process, from defining a feature to ensuring the feature continues to work – next week or next year.

So sleep tight!

Out with the Old, In with the New: Rutland Regional Medical Center Launches New Site!

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Andrea Joyner

The marketing team at Rutland Regional Medical Center, in partnership with Geonetric, decided it was time for a fresh start on their website. But we didn’t stop at doing just a few touch-ups; we rolled up our sleeves and did a total overhaul! Not only did we jump in with a total redesign, we completely scrapped the content of the old website and started from scratch.

Previously, the Rutland Regional team was frustrated that they couldn’t make their own changes, so they are thrilled with the flexibility and control they now have with VitalSite. “You mean I can change that myself?” Yep, all the power to maintain your website right at your fingertips!

And while the design of the site took on a fresh look and feel, the Rutland Regional team and Geonetric went the extra mile with the imagery. This team launched the Rutland Regional website without a single piece of stock photography. That is a big accomplishment no matter what size your website is!

High-five to the Rutland Regional team on their beautiful new website! All the hard work is worth it when you get results like this, so out with the old and in with the new!