Enhanced Care and Nursing Home Accordion

Enhanced Listings on County Pages

Today we release a change to our main county pages on the website so they now include an accordion containing any enhanced listings for the county. We implemented an accordion which is collapsed on page load so we still have the county list above the fold.

We feel this improves the quality of the page by adding relevant content that is useful to the visitor but also adds another avenue of promotion to care and nursing homes which have an enhanced listing with us.

Collapsed Enhanced Listings

Expanded Enhanced Listings

New Feature Release: Home Facilities

Care and Nursing Home Facility Lists

Releasing our new add and update home form has been very successful and we have decided to add some more data points to our database. We have complied a list of what we think is a good start, you can see the list at the bottom of this post.

Form

Our form makes use of check boxes for inputting the homes specialisms, activities and facilities we decided that these are still be for multiple choice form fields.

We feel our form is complete now but as always we will be reviewing it in time so we can make sure its up to date and relevant we will also be reviewing both our activities and facilities lists to make sure there is no overlap between the two.

Listing

Our listing pages now have a new tab for displaying the homes facilities list we are considering combining both the activities tab and the facilities tab because they are similar and would also bulk up the pages a bit more rather than a small list on both pages. It also makes it one less click for our visitors so maybe in the future we will implement this.

It is already a popular feature and we have had a submission every day so far so we consider it a success so far and we hope that our visitors and home owners and managers find it a useful tool for them to take advantage of.

Conclusion

If you are a care manager or owner and your home is listed then all you have to do to add your facilities is go to your homes listing page and click the edit homes details link to open the wiki form.

Also I will also remind visitors they are encourage to help add any information we maybe missing for a listing.

Facilities List

Aromatherapy
Assisted Bath
Assisted Shower
Cable TV
Car Park
Cater for Special Diets
Chiropody
Companion Rooms
Dentist
Dining Room
En-suite Bath
En-suite Shower
En-suite Toilet
Garden
Hairdressing
Hydrotherapy
Internet
Jacuzzi
Laundry
Lounge
Massage
Minibus
Nurse Call System
Open Visits
Optician
PassengerLift
Personal Possessions
Pets
Physiotherapy
Purpose Built
Reflexology
Religious Services
Retained or Personal GP
Secure Storage
Sensory Room
Shop
Single Rooms
Stair Lift
Tea and Coffee Making
Telephone Points
Television Points
Wheelchair Access
Wireless Internet

New Feature Release: Update Homes via Form

Basic Wiki Like Features

Our latest release has added support for updating or adding new homes to the directory via an online form rather than relying on home owners and managers emailing us.

We use a staging table as a buffer between our live database and the new data which is reviewed by us before being copied over into the main database. We hope this will prevent abuse because any changes are reviewed.

In future versions we plan on adding to our data set as to make our visitors as informed as possible on what a home has to offer residents. We currently collect specialisms such as Dementia Care and also activities a home may offer but we would like to add facilities to our listings.

Below is a screen shot of a listing page for a random home I have highlighted the link for editing the listings details.

Edit Home Link

When you click the link you are presented with the wiki form for editing the existing homes details and the form is pre populated with the relevant data for the home making it easier to edit.

If you do not pass an id then it will create a new home. Below is another screen shot this time its the actual form used.

New Form

Any visitors to the website are permitted to submit a new home or edit an existing homes details in fact we encourage our visitors to amend any mistakes or missing information although we cannot guarantee that all submission will be added.

We also hope any home owners or managers will take advantage of this feature to show case their home to potential residents or their families.

Using the noodp Meta Tag

Trying to Control Titles

Recently we noticed Google appending text to our title tags which we did not want because we feel our titles are fine and its not Google's place to  modify our content.

It would appear that Google is appending our old brand name to the end of some of our titles and it makes some of them look really irrelevant.

For example if we did a care home related search it would show {OUR_TITLE} - The Nursing Homes Directory which look really bad if the search is care as it looks completely unrelated when in fact it is relevant.

Seems that Google is getting the appended text from the ODP (Demoz) listing we have which was still listing our old brand which was The Nursing Homes Directory.

In our attempt at trying to get these appendices removed from our titles we decided to use the googlebot meta tag and set the content to noodp which instructs Google not to use the ODP for extra information on our website

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp">

 
Currently this seems to have worked and most of our titles are back to normal for the affected SERPs. It is disappointing that Google has now decided to modify a websites content and I personally think they should not do it as I think the same with bubbling but that is another topic altogether.

Source Tree

New Feature Release: Add or Update Homes Direct

Visitor Home Submissions

We have release a new feature allowing our visitors to submit new care or nursing homes to our directory of homes. Allowing home owners to submit their details direct from their browser is more direct rather than having to send emails.

This makes our job as administrators easier because now all we have to do is click a link to activate the home or if its an update it will overwrite the existing one.

Our hope is this helps improve our data set and also make our lives and our home owners lives that bit easier.

Home Form