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Should a designer tell his medical clients to jump into social media?

By Dennis Guten on January 29, 2012 No Comments

A meeting I had this morning with a web design client brings up an interesting question for my company, GushinDesigns, and for me also to ponder. 

Yelp

My client is pretty tech savvy on some fronts. He has a MacBook Pro, iPad and iPhone after all and seems at ease using the technology. 

I’m redesigning his website for his business. He is an eye doctor and the site is for his medical practice which is in a standalone office nearby. 

The doctor, while technically knowledgeable, is not well versed in social media. He has been given advice that his website and his practice should be using social media to attract the younger affluent clients the office is seeking. He was advised to start using a Facebook business page, Twitter, Foursquare and Yelp.

So far I have added these four social media icons to the design, but we have only gone forward with the Yelp account, which consisted of “claiming” his business and creating a free business Yelp account.

We discussed the other three today and have ruled out Foursquare as something that just was not relevant enough for a doctor’s office. There is a large staff in the office and someone will be relegated the duties of preparing Twitter and Facebook business page updates on a regular basis, as well as checking Yelp to see if there would be any responses needed for reviews. The doctor does not plan on being involved directly with the accounts.

That’s all fine and I will get it all set-up for the site. The thing I wonder is this: For this type of a business, how needed are these social media accounts, given that they will mostly be used as broadcast accounts to post info about the business and tidbits about the profession? I doubt any real interaction will take place and isn’t that what social media is all about in the first place? Also, what will happen if the one employee that lands this duty leaves the business? 

That’s on top of the other issue of whether it is wise for doctors to be using these tools in the first place. My wife, and business partner in GushinDesigns found this interesting article about this issue: Some doctors try to squelch online reviews (Washington Post).

 I’d appreciate it if any other web designers or social media people would chime in and give me an opinion on this subject.

Categories : Internet, Social Media, Web Client, Web Design, WordPress
Tags : Web Design

I created a political website!

By Dennis Guten on May 6, 2011 No Comments

Yes, that’s correct. I actually made a political campaign website.

The site is for a friend, John DeMattia, for the Richardson, TX City Council Elections coming up on May 14th. The site address is: www.johnforrichardson.com and it’s a little six-pager I put together using my “Antares” website framework. The site is called: www.johnforrichardson.com.

John is running because he has witnessed the current city government mismanage funds and get the city into debt by making unwise choices. John wants to get Richardson, TX back on a fiscally sound standing and help the city by serving.

He is a member of an organization called The Richardson Citizens Alliance, which is running a slate of candidates to oppose the Richardson Coalition candidates, some of whom are the incumbents in the race.

Antares is a small framework I have been working on for a while and have finished and put the final touches on. This was the first real test to see just how much time I could save using it as a starting base of code for a site.

It essentially gives me a frame of header, content and footer with all margins, padding, divs, CSS, HTML, SlideShowPro (a flash based slide show software) and Lightbox (image zoom effect where the background grays out) all pre-coded. You just create a certain sized header and footer and add copy and images and the site fills in pretty quickly.

In this case, from start to finish it took 2.25 hours to make the site.

Categories : Elections, Politics, Web Design

Launch of the new UT Dallas Debate website in WordPress

By Dennis Guten on March 13, 2011 No Comments

Where I work, at The University of Texas at Dallas, the Debate program is an important part of the university’s identity, likewise with the Chess program.

In fall of 2010 I launched the redesign or the Chess website in one of our new templates, which we call Venus. It was coded using Adobe Dreamweaver templates.

Since then, we have started rolling our some new sites using the WordPress MU platform, which is the multi-user version of WordPress.

The UT Dallas Debate website is the first site I have redesigned using WordPress and it just launched this past week. It also uses the Venus template, which first had to be imported into WordPress. It was the first Venus site our team in University Web Services had done so there was a big learning curve getting the template into WordPress in the first place.

It’s not totally like creating a WordPress template from scratch, which I have not attempted, because you are not using any widgets like most templates would use.

It was essentially chopping our already coded template up into the various php files that make up the pieces of a template. It was complicated by the fact that our Dreamweaver templates share CSS and other code from a templates directory on our server and that had to be preserved in case there are changes to the template down the road which will change all sites using Venus.

I think the site worked out pretty well and you cannot tell that the Chess site is static HTML and the Debate site is WordPress.

Has anyone else tried to do this with their different sites and what was your experience?

Categories : UT Dallas, Web Design, WordPress
Tags : Debate, UT Dallas, WordPress
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