Merry Christmas 2012!
December 25, 2012
At DocSpot, our mission is to connect people with the right health care by helping them navigate publicly available information. We believe the first step of that mission is to help connect people with an appropriate medical provider, and we look forward to helping people navigate other aspects of their care as the opportunities arise. We are just at the start of that mission, so we hope you will come back often to see how things are developing.
An underlying philosophy of our work is that right care means different things to different people. We also recognize that doctors are multidimensional people. So, instead of trying to determine which doctors are "better" than others, we offer a variety of filter options that individuals can apply to more quickly discover providers that fit their needs.
December 25, 2012
Merry Christmas!
May joy, peace, and love fill this holiday season.
December 22, 2012
As 2012 winds down and we prepare for 2013, we rolled out a couple of cosmetic changes to our site this past week. First, we moved popular social media icons up near the sign-in link. Although the change itself is small, it represents a larger effort of trying to keep people updated on those social media platforms. The second change is that we've created an About Us page and updated content that used to be above the blog.
The next couple of weeks will be fairly quiet for us and we look forward to an engaging 2013.
December 14, 2012
On Tuesday of this week (December 11th), our website was unavailable for about 3 hours. We found out about the outage pretty quickly because we continually monitor our site. However, we didn't have a great way of informing users of the site since we don't have a good channel to communicate with them other than the site itself. In the future, we'd like to be able to automatically switch the site over to a backup server, but in the meantime, we ask for your patience and hope that you'll check back later should this happen again.
For those who are curious about the details, we rent space for our server (known as colocation) and our colocation provider's internet access became unavailable for a few hours. We've had another issue with the colocation provider near the end of November, and each time, they say that there's a new fix in place. For now, we plan on staying with our current provider, but if problems continue, we'll consider alternatives.
December 07, 2012
This week, we rolled out some significant changes. You might not have noticed them, even if you looked closely. That's because the changes were not visual, but instead were related to the speed with which our server calculates the web pages. We've been wanting to improve performance for quite a while and recently figured out how to do so.
Earlier this year, we bought a server with a significant amount of memory in recognition of the increased traffic that the server had been facing. We figured out how to put more of that memory to use, rolling out those changes this week. The result? A site that is (hopefully) noticeably faster.
December 03, 2012
Over the last few months, we have been surprised by how much of the traffic to our website has been via mobile devices. We initially assumed that searching for doctors would be a data-intensive process, one that would virtually require the screen real estate of a desktop browser.
The data has surprised us. Given how many people visit our site via mobile devices, we are thinking of prioritizing the development of our site to better serve those users. Before we get too far in the development process, however, we'd like to get a better sense of how people look for doctors on their mobile device. If you have searched for a doctor on a mobile device, we'd like to hear from you and get your thoughts on how a physician directory should be designed to better suit the needs of users on the go. Are you interested?