Why This Web Designer Is Focused On Health & Wellness

Many people lately have asked if we’ll do websites for non health and wellness organizations. Short answer is YES!… BUT…

Esyngen is focussed on health and wellness because we think this is the biggest challenge facing our communities and our world today and tomorrow. In Canada, as in most nations, the population is aging faster than it’s ability to deal with an explosion of age related and chronic disease. Simply put, it’s our hope and mission to help be part of the solution for personal and ethical reasons.

There are one-stop-shop solutions for most professions here in Canada. From real estate agents to dentists and doctors. For example the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) has their ‘myDoctor.ca’ portal. Results have been mixed I think. The design quality is not reflective of the stature of the profession. I can’t argue with the no/low cost and ease of set-up of these template hosted systems. With professionals time so constrained it makes a great deal of sense. The aggregation of sites under a single roof, the portal, means there are also great opportunities for extending functionality. Building connectors to back-end medical record systems for instance.  I just think the initial pages of the site should better reflect the personality and unique services of the individual practices. All the sites kind of look the same right now. Frankly, every doctor I have met is shall we say unique. Years of text books and cadavers might have something to do with it.

An open call to Canadian health professionals who have just gone with the one-stop-shop approach…

Why not have a designer craft a quality first impression reflecting you, your personality and your talents? Build an intro site you are proud to show off because it represents who you are and puts a human face to your work.

Then have the site link patients or clients into the portal with its extended capabilities.

As a business professional I am willing to pay doctors a house call. I know they don’t have time at the office. Have a hot coffee or cold beer waiting, depending on the hour of day, and I can work with you to craft that important first impression, that builds trust and communicates the valuable and essential work you do in the community.

In the meantime and as long as there is honest work to be done, the answer is YES we do other sites. Health and wellness is the focus but not the only clients we serve.

To Good Health!

graham@esyngen.com
www.esyngen.com

Follow Esyngen on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Has Social Media Marketing Killed Creativity?

Wow! What could be more confusing than looking at all those little icons and trying to figure out which ones are really going to make it. You know the ones I’m talking about the tiny little colourful ones in the sidebar, that say things like Digg this and Tweet that, share on Facebook and subscribe to such and such a feed.  YouTube, Flikr, MySpace, Orkut etc. There are 225 that I know of and probably hundreds more just bubbling up. But while the social media landscape is relatively young it has matured quickly. There are now only a handful of dominant players; ones who could command the elusive IPO or a billion dollar buyout.

And that is as it should be.

Sound like heresy to advocate consolidation? Choice after all keeps a free market free right? Well too much choice can create confusion on days when you’re in a hurry? When you go to the beer store that wall of 300 types of beer can be a little overwhelming so you go with what you know.

Actually it’s not that there is too much choice, it’s just that it isn’t well organized. Microblogging and virtual worlds have been dumped alongside, media sharing and social networks. We were left with a mess of tiny icons until along came a few who got it. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter inventor Evan Williams. They understood that there was a mess and clearly saw an opportunity for organization.  It might not have been a plan for global domination but it helped clean things up a bit.

A Platform. Voila! We have a winner.

Or 3 or 4 of them at least. That’s a whole lot better than 225 tiny icons crammed beside each other. We are left with Twitter and Facebook (and YouTube and LinkedIn and, oh ya that little orange RSS thingy). I like the little Facebook ‘F’ and Twitter ‘T’ .  Those who rage against Twitter or who have logged off Facebook permanently probably have other issues with technology. We won’t include them in the debate. They have chosen not to participate.

But the rest of us can now see the forest for the trees. And so can the marketers. Money is being made and all is well again…

Something about these new ad execs is remarkably different from the old school though. They look nerdy. Have poor social skills, ironically, and their tools look more like spreadsheets and calculators than paint brushes and cameras. These new ad men sell ‘text’ not glossy 4 colour ads or :30 second masterpieces. They sell highly targeted, pithy messages in black and white 10 point letters. Advertising online is pure science and where mind reading used to be the mystic skill of a good creative director, it’s now  more stats and accounting and less joyful expression.

Thankfully, all that creative juice did go somewhere. Nature abhors a vacuum after all. Hovering the cursor over that cold, stark hyperlink and lying just a click of a mouse away is creative Nirvana. Elegant prose punctuated by stunning  photography, graphics and thought provoking videos. The brilliant creative minds didn’t fade out after all. They just became web designers.

Graham Newbigging is owner of Esyngen, web design, social media marketing, search engine optimization and mobile web apps for health and wellness organizations.

graham@esyngen.com
www.esyngen.com

Follow Esyngen on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Web, SEO, Social Media & Mobile Apps for Health & Wellness

Hi I’m Graham, author of the Esyngen Blog. A while back some of my close programmer buddies started calling me GMan and it kind of led to the little cartoon guy at the top. To keep it fun and recognizable we stuck with ‘GMan’ as the mascot/avatar for the Blog. Yes I do tend to wear a lot of black, kind of goes with the territory and speeds dressing in the mornings. Feel free to call me Graham though, my family still does.

This Blog covers all things ‘web’ and ‘mobile’ related to the health and wellness sector. You’ll find postings on web design, social media, search engine optimization and the latest and greatest in mobile apps specific to health and wellness. Hop on over to www.esyngen.com for information on services offered by the company.

Esyngen was started back in 1996 as a way to scratch that entrepreneurial itch I had developed while working in online marketing in Toronto. Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to work with many innovative and enterprising healthcare and IT professionals. This led naturally to our mission serving the online and mobile IT needs of health and wellness professionals; from the men and women doing cutting edge medical and biotech research to the doctors and nurses who save lives in communities around the world to the advocates promoting healthy body, mind, and spirit lifestyles. This last group deserves some special attention. The risks for acute health problems like heart attack and stroke along with chronic diseases like Type II diabetes are greatly reduced when we focus on proactive health and wellbeing strategies like reducing stress and improving fitness and nutrition.

How does Esyngen help? We use web and mobile technology to enhance knowledge sharing and collaboration. We are the ‘web guys’ for health and wellness professionals. So, I do hope you’ll learn a bunch on this blog. At times it’ll be ‘sciency’ and maybe a bit ‘technical’ but not overly so. Consideration will be given to straight forward, relevant explanations. Where appropriate you’ll find links to sites that provide more background and details. Our goal will be to synthesize what we discover and make it applicable to the health and wellness sector. We’ll be as pragmatic and practical as we can so you can quickly appreciate the merits and challenges of a particular technology in the hope that you find the information useful or even actionable.

Follow-us on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook. If you don’t know what all the fuss is about with social media, just bookmark this blog and come back periodically or, if you prefer, drop me an email and I’ll be sure you are regularly updated.

To good health!

GMan   a.k.a Graham
www.esyngen.com
graham@esyngen.com