Seattle Children’s Hospital has a number of clinical programs for which we are renowned. We are currently in the process of developing web sites for each of these programs, and we recently launched our latest web site, for our Transplant Premier Program
Incredibly, this site took about a year to develop. Yes, that is a long time, but due to the breadth of the content, the content development process was extremely time-consuming.
You wouldn’t believe the amount writing, editing, review and sign-off that the content went through in order to bring it down to the appropriate reading level for our audience.
Powered by Movable Type
The site itself is almost entirely powered by Movable Type. We’re soon(ish) to embark on a selection process for a more full-featured CMS, but for the time-being, MT certainly does a more-than-adequate job.
Rounded Boxes
On the home page we used Roger Johansson’s rounded boxes technique that uses CSS and JavaScript.
What to Expect
In our “What to Expect” sections, we included links to the previous and next pages at the bottom of each page. We did this to make it clear that there was an order in which the pages should be read.
In our usability testing on other sites, we’d noticed that if people arrived directly at one of these pages (say, via search) they did not always realize that there was additional information (both before and after) that was relevant to them.
The addition of these ‘previous’ and ‘next’ links makes it easier for visitors to know where to go next.
Contact Us
We were also quite pleased with our contact page which uses a three-column approach to make efficient use of the available space in presenting a considerable amount of contact information.
Nice work! We’re glad to see you used Movable Type — if there’s features or functionality that you’re looking for in your future projects, please let us know, as we’d love to have you keep using MT for this kind of work. Congrats on the launch and for a really elegant design.
*Anil* – I think the main thing we would like is the ability to use MT as more of a lightweight CMS than just a blogging application.
You can just about do that with it now, but it requires a lot of plugins and hacking about. Although I haven’t used it, my impression is that WordPress has the edge in this regard.
Also, it would be great to be able to list the next ‘n’ future posts as well as the last ‘n’. It’s frustrating that this functionality is not included as it’s essential for doing any kind of calendar list of events.
You wouldn’t believe the lengths I’ve gone to to get MT to do this (and I’ve still failed)!