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

New Feature Release: Improved Saved Homes Lists

Improved Saved Care and Nursing Home List

After the successfully release of our new saved homes list we have improved upon the current offering by adding more data to the comparison table and adding the telephone number to the bottom home list.

You can click the link to call the home and if a suitable handler is found it will use that program to make the call so if you use a SIP phone you can call them directly from your PC. We use tel: prefix inside the href of the a tag which indicates to modern browsers that it is a telephone number.

We have added more rows to the comparison table so it now shows a homes specialisms in a quick easy to read format. We have red x to convey it is not offered and a green tick to show the service is offered.

For icons we discovered a nice set of free open images which you can find at this site. We are currently considering moving our icon set over to theirs so we can standardise our images making them look more uniform and consistent.

Our hope is that these improvements help our visitors make a decision between a list of candidate homes.

Saved Home List

Care Home Supplier Directory

Free Supplier Listings

Recently we have been working on a new section for our website which we feel will integrate nicely and is relevant to our sector and will provide our visitors with a useful service.

The service provides free listings for providers of services and products in the care sector so they can connect with care and nursing home owners. You can find the sign up form for this service by following this link.

Supplies

Service Features

Our initial version provides all the base functionality we feel is needed for the service and we have plans for future versions to add even more functionality to the system.

Signup is free to all businesses and once you login to our panel you can create the content for your new listing and also upload your companies logo (1Mb in size).

You can add your social media links, email address, telephone, fax and more we currently support Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

Screen Shots

Below are some screen shot of the service the first one is the listing editor located in the supplier control panel. This allows users to add content to their page and manage their logo image. Our editor is similar to an office document editor and is simple to use.

Listing Editor

The main listings page is shown in the below screenshot this is the homepage for the supplier directory and it lists the current suppliers. We plan on adding some promotional areas to the layout of this page at a future date.

Suppliers Page

Final screen shot is the actual listing page for the supplier, we allow a single supplier per single account. Each single supplier gets a listing page which they can edit using the online editor via their browser.

Listing Page

Feedback

All user feed back is appreciated and we would welcome working with a supplier to improve the service even more. If you would like to send feedback or participate in improving your listing please contact us using this form and we will email you back. You could also contact me using Google+.

Conclusion

With the release of our new service we hope to connect care and nursing homes with suppliers who can provide them with quality services and/or products.

As with all software this will be an iterative development cycle trying to add specific features one at a time. We hope to build a great service for our visitors.

Visitor Care and Nursing Home Lists

Allowing Visitors to Save Personal Lists

Our  most recent release has added support for allowing visitors to save care homes and agencies to their own personal list of homes which can then be compared and viewed at a later date.

Saving Lists

To save a home the visitor clicks the Save Home link highlighted red in the screen shot below this link has an onclick handler registered to run the add method which contains the JavaScript for saving.

Town Listing with Save Link

HomeList.js provides all the client side functionality we need and it is this class which implements the add method mentioned above. We also make use of an external class name uuid.core.js which we use to generate a UUID for each visitor.

Our UUID uses version 4 of the UUID specification which can be found here we decided to use an existing implementation because if you look at the code I dont think it can be done any better.

We save this UUID in a cookie for two months and all homes added to a visitor list are deleted after seven days. Another constraint we have is that a visitor can only save 20 items to their list.

Listing Page with Save Link

Visitors can also add homes to their list from the actual listing page of the home which is highlighted red in the picture above.

Viewing Lists

Visitors can view their own lists by clicking the View Saved Homes link which is located in the top left corner of all pages and is highlighted red in the screen shot below. This link uses the top and right CSS properties with a position of absolute.

The current version only allows certain comparisons but we plan on increasing what you can compare and also select only what you want to see in later versions.

Visitor List

Conclusion

This feature has already been well accepted by our visitors and we are currently monitoring its usage and hope to improve the service even more in the future.

We also released a number of other features with this release and we will be writing about them in future postings so stay tuned.