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 | Healthsite Overview: Medical News Today |  |
When users first visit http://medicalnewstoday.com, it won’t take long for them to see how the site got its name. One of several navigation options, the list of News Categories alone offers information more than 100 medical conditions and procedures, ranging from “Abortion” to “Women’s Health/OBGYN."
When users select a category from the list, such as Alzheimer’s, they are taken to a page that provides a comprehensive list of news stories published on the condition. The content provided by the links is stored on the medicalnewstoday.com Web site, which keeps visitors from getting confused by being pushed from one site to another. Given that each category contains dozens, if not hundreds, of published articles to read, keeping the user on-site is a very convenient feature.
Billing itself as the largest independent health and medical news Web site on the Internet, convenience and attention to detail clearly were areas of focus for the designers. Medicalnewstoday.com has been designed to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which were created to make browsing and navigation easier for people with disabilities. The site complies with the minimum of level A accessibility standard, as well as conforming to many other checkpoints in the higher guideline levels.
In addition to viewing several dozen daily medical articles on the home page, visitors also can access the site’s free medical tools and content section. People can create a customized Medical News Today news feed for their own Web sites in JavaScript or RSS/XML (the feed is free but registration is required); they also can use the site’s Medical Abbreviation search box on their own Web site. Other free tools include a Desktop Search Box for medical searches directly from a PC’s desktop and a free medical toolbar that installs onto Internet Explorer and offers all of MediLexicon’s search facilities on the browser. Finally, the home page contains a section in which visitors can search for jobs in the medical fields.
Other well-planned features of the site include a list of links created specifically for healthcare professionals, and a search feature that allows visitors to search by medical abbreviation. The latter is an especially handy feature, as the healthcare industry is awash in similar-sounding medical acronyms that can easily confuse the most well-informed user. Doing a search with a medical abbreviation pulls up a new window that provides search results and explanations directly from www.medilexicon.com, one of its sister sites.
Medicalnewstoday.com offers a free email newsletter (it requires registration) on health conditions selected from a comprehensive drop-down menu. If users don't want to wait for a week to receive a comprehensive list, they can choose to receive their information via the site’s News Alerts, which email the user as soon as a new article is posted in one of the selected categories.
More than 2 million unique visitors come to www.medicalnewstoday.com every month. Sister sites include the aforementioned www.medilexicon.com, as well as www.hospitalsworldwide.com - a searchable database of hospitals throughout the world. In total, the three sites attract more than 3 million unique visitors every month.
Finally, the site provides a message board, in which registered users can interact, ask for and give advice, and comment on articles published on the site.
Last modified: 20 Sep 2006.
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