Internet Strategy for Johns Hopkins Medicine
How does an institution imbued with history and tradition — yet also a continual source of innovation and advancement — connect with a generational group known for being wary of all standard marketing and communication practices? That was the challenge put before the Internet Strategy team as they began looking for better ways to digitally(...)
Wrong! Today, Google indexes over 30 trillion unique individual web pages. That makes the new web page you just launched one in 30 trillion. When it comes to page ranking at the top of Google searches, you have better odds of winning the lottery. Hopkinsmedicine.org is one of the most visited hospital or academic medical(...)
“Purpose-built” is a concept most often associated with physical design — buildings, vehicles, even kitchen implements — but it has relevancy to content as well. Purpose-built pretty much means what it says (I love when terms are clear like that!): designed to serve a specific set of uses and standards. But there’s also a lot packed(...)
Over the course of my career, I’ve thrice had the opportunity to midwife print publications to online rebirths. Despite occurring over a span of more years than I care to admit, the success of all these projects revolved around a critical realization. I had a chance to call on this learning as the Johns Hopkins(...)
WYSIWYG is dead. If that statement caused a reaction—whether a frown of worry or a smile—then you’re probably one the people throughout Johns Hopkins Medicine who uses our WYSIWYG, short for “what you see is what you get,” tools to edit Web content. In reality, WYSIWYG isn’t by any means dead, but it is getting(...)
Our website comprises thousands of other webpages, and thanks to search engines, visitors can come directly to any of them. But no single page on the site is as important as the home page. The home page hopkinsmedicine.org has a big job. It reflects the values and ambitions of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, the School(...)
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the Internet Strategy team is focusing on consumer-oriented health content as a strategy for meeting the strategic priority of patient- and family-centered care. So it’s pretty exciting to introduce the new Healthy Aging section on hopkinsmedicine.org. Healthy Aging focuses on bringing consumers clear, actionable information about how(...)
Patient- and family-centered care is about putting the patient first, or, as Peter Pronovost summed up in one of his blog posts, making the patient the North Star of the care we provide. As one of our strategic priorities, patient- and family-centered care is at the heart of what we do on the Web at(...)
There are key points on which pure web content is based. To name a few… Identify your audience Tell your story Present accessible, digestible content Provide factual and current information Optimize your content Ensure contextual relevancy Factual information is of upmost importance and particularly relevant when writing about health information and the field of medicine. (...)
A former colleague once diagnosed the site of the company we both worked for as suffering from the “coral reef effect.” Articles kept building up, layer upon layer, with a thin layer of new material and a deep, almost unused archived content. Some of that content was strong and still relevant, but the good stuff(...)