Carelink website case study - www.carelink.co.uk

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Carelink website case study

Background

Carelink is the health division of ioko, a leading IT services and development company. Carelink focuses primarily on the NHS, with the services and solutions it offers driven to a large extent by its ability to offer NHSnet hosting. Over 200 NHS organisations run their websites from the Carelink hosting environment.

Only a minority of NHS websites are content managed, with most being either Dreamweaver or FrontPage based, or built using simple ASP on an Access or SQL database. Carelink has developed a standard content management system site framework in the form of NHS Core Site. Originally this was based on MS CMS, but was redeveloped in EPiServer CMS during 2005 as part of a strategic alliance with EPiServer UK.

Carelink’s own website (which is distinct from the main ioko website) was also based on MS CMS. However the additional functionality and superior ease of use provided by the EPiServer-based NHS Core Site became increasingly attractive. A decision was taken to migrate the Carelink website to use the same framework as NHS Core Site in February 2006, in advance of sales activity at the Healthcare Computing 2006 conference.

Aims and Motivators

Around half the inbound opportunities for the Carelink business originate from the website, with most visitors to the site arriving via Google. Since going live with the MS CMS version of the site in 2004, the site has routinely appeared in the top 3 Google searches for all the key search terms relevant to Carelink’s business (NHSnet, NHS SharePoint, etc.). Although greatly improved from the previous site, the MS CMS system had proved somewhat cumbersome to use, had limited features and was, in any event, in need of a look and feel refresh to match the evolving Carelink brand.

NHS Core Site is considered to be the class leading option for NHS websites. Considerable sales and marketing effort is focused on taking the solution to market. It became clear that the Carelink website needed to not only showcase the capabilities and professionalism of the Carelink business but also demonstrate the NHS Core Site solution. By using the NHS Core Site framework as the basis for the new Carelink site the objectives outlined could be achieved as well as providing a full online demonstration of solution.

Finally, with the continued growth of the Carelink business, a greater number of staff is required to both provide content to the site and use web-based services, some of which are provided by the NHS Core Site framework, in their day-to-day activities.

Challenges

As previously observed, search engine placement, especially Google, is a key driver of business. Carelink has a unique and compelling range of services; however driving awareness of these with potential clients is difficult due to the nebulous nature of the NHS and the different role types that might be interested. In migrating to the new CMS the existing URL’s stored by the web search engines would become invalid (though the main site address, www.carelink.co.uk remained unchanged), resulting on potential loss of business.

In addition the Carelink site had around 200 pages, most of which needed to be migrated, complete with images and attached documents, but with a need for the new cascading style sheet styles to be applied.

As with many such internal projects, it is hard to justify pulling developer time from paid work. A maximum of two days of developer time were negotiated with the Application Development Group to make some modifications to the framework and support deployment, while the Systems Group were in a position to support addition of the site Carelink’s EPiServer hosting server.

No resource was available to support content migration however. Thus it fell to Carelink’s General Manager, Simon Hudson, to take responsibility for content transfer. A small window of opportunity for this presented itself, with some 10 hours being available over the course of a Friday to Monday.

Text Box: } no resource was available to support content migration ~

Result

The NHS Core Site framework has been created to make it easy to update style sheets, alter logos and core site images etc. In practice it proved to be comparatively easy to replicate and extend all the visible functionality of the MS CMS based site into the new EPiServer site. This was greatly aided by the extensive range of templates provided in the framework (largely derived from the standard EPiServer templates, extended with a series of feature boxes on the right of the page for page listings, more information etc.). This was achieved within the 2 days of developer time allocated.

The ‘tweaked’ solution was deployed onto the server on day 3 and made available for content migration.

It had been hoped to use EPiGrabber to aid migration, but this could not be installed and configured in the time available. Thus content was transferred manually, copy from the live site and pasting, unformatted, into new pages. A temporary change to the hosts file allowed both new and old sites to be accessed live over the internet. Images were saved from the live site and loaded into a folder structure in the EPiServer based site. Some content rewrite was conducted and improvements in layout achieved using the more attractive CSS styles, use of brand-coloured horizontal rules and replacement of feature content to the flexible Free Text box on the right of the pages. Some care was made to ensure page descriptions and search terms were entered into the page metadata, to aid search engine crawlers re-index the site.

Even without EPiGrabber the site content was completed within the time allocated.

DNS entries were switched on the Tuesday and the site went live just 7 days after work first commenced.

A custom 404 page was created, initially as a content managed page, in order to provide a friendly landing page for users using stored links or, now out-of-date, links in search engines. In the event this could not be made to work as a page within the EPiServer CMS and a standalone ASP page was created from the CMS page. With a small amount of scripting on IIS, this fully addressed the concern about redirects from the search engines etc.

Within 10 days of going live the new Carelink site page URL’s appeared in the major search engines and the site regained it’s rightful place at the top of the listings for the desired search terms.

Benefits

The new site has already proved to be valuable. Because it is easier to add and maintain content there has been an increase in the amount of topical material added to the site by the Carelink team. The ease of creating users and groups, with differing permission across the site, has also meant that some Carelink partners have been given rights to maintain their own company and technology pages on the site (Interse, for instance, now maintain their partner page and details of their impressive iBox search and metadata technology).

The site has been extensively used during client demonstrations of NHS Core Site, often eliminating the need for a VPC or local installation. A full NHS Core Site sub area, complete with NHS branding and sample content, has been added to the Carelink site. This has the added advantage that clients can revisit the site at any time to review the features they have seen during the demonstration. The fact that Carelink uses essentially the same solution for itself that it offers to its clients demonstrates our confidence with the product. Familiarity with the Carelink site has two additional halo effects; the Carelink sales team, by using the Carelink site, have become more confident about the feature set and usability of NHS Core Site, while the solution itself has now been deeply tested and a small, but important set of enhancements identified.

A number of mobile pages have been added to the site, allowing access to the core content (and restricted commercial data via a log in) from a PDA or smart phone over GPRS.

Finally the slide show template is being used to provide a rolling slide show during the forthcoming Healthcare Computing 2006 Conference, reinforcing our desire to let our technologies sell themselves.

The Future

A further update of the site is likely as part of a broader ioko brand refresh later this year, drawing on the ioko site rebuild, also developed in EPiServer. In parallel EPiGrabber, EPiTrace and other interesting modules emerging from ElektroPost are to be introduced. A full upgrade to EPiServer 4.6 is also anticipated.

Because of the breadth of services provided by Carelink and ioko, navigation and organisation of site content can often be a challenge. While the built-in search and clear menu structures help, we are also intending to introduce a radical new, complementary navigation metaphor during 2006.

Finally consideration is being given to integration of NHS Core Site with Windows SharePoint Services and to Microsoft Live Meeting (both sold as part of the ioko Connect collaboration suite).