Road to 2005
The last time I spoke in front of a large group of people, was probably around 6 years ago, when I had to show the new (at the time) Hutcheson Medical Center website to our Board of Directors. The time before that, was when I showed the entire group of managers and directors at Hutcheson the first intranet. Each time, it was a little nerve-wracking since I usually only had a couple of days to plan and layout my presentation.
This time I had a month, but it’s been one of the strangest and busiest months and to put this kinda project together in the midst of that, was just a struggle. So last Thursday, I gave my little PowerPoint on my 2 years at Erlanger and the process we’ve gone through to get to where we are now. I’ve met (and exceeded) my goals for the first year and a half for the site and now we can brag a little while we start planning the next version.
I’m not a fan of an entire PowerPoint comprised of charts, so I have a simple message were I discussed the original # of unique visits, where we were at 6 months in, and where we’re at now. And how we got those numbers up and how we compare with our peers across the nation. I speak better on a weblog than I can present, so it’s something I’m still working on.
So, with that PowerPoint behind me, I’m setting some new goals for rest of 2004 and the continuing development of the site. Some of the things, I really don’t ever want to put on a public website, until the new site is launched. But some of the basic ideas are below:
* Ditch tables, convert to tableless design.
* Heighten accessibility, beyond what we’re doing now.
* Increase visitors by 10%, every 6 months.
* Create a more “flexible” layout.
* Reexamine our secret ingredient, make sweeter. Sorry that’s from “Road to 1985, when I was working on New Coke.
Honestly, that’s it for the design portion. We’ll work on lots of the processes behind the scenes, and things like user testing. But everything else is starting from scratch.
June 1st, 2004 at 12:06 pm
I recently took on the job of doing the networking and Intranet for a small regional health care center — nothing on the scale of Erlanger, but I imagine some of the same principles apply.
The first thing I noticed about your post was when you said that you speak better on a weblog than in person. As we begin the process of moving portions of the Intranet to a publicly accesible webserver I find myself having a terrible time explaining my methodology to these people. For many of the suits involved the sum of their Internet expierience consists of AOL and monitoring their kids chat, though all are well educated professionals these people lack even a basic grasp of accesibility requirements and standards compliance.
Because I write so much better than I speak the first thing I did was create a weblog allowing me to detail the changes and progress. When I try this in person their eyes glaze over quickly, however doing it on a weblog seems to allow them the time they need to absorb the information and has the added bonus of hyperlinks. They tend to believe what they read and handy references (most of which are whitepapers and such, maybe not authoritative but to these people they look like real studies, and one thing I’ve learned is medical professionals like their footnotes and bibliographies) help make my case.