New Site Launch

byLabman

79.2K followers

Updated 9 years ago

I've been a bit behind the scenes for a couple of weeks. It seems I have been drawn in to a really important niche.

I really need to learn to "just say no" but this niche can be a passionate one. It is one of the Evergreen niches. (The Evergreen niches are Health, Wealth and Happiness)

So what happened? I was chatting one day, with a friend. She has been having a rough time dealing with a disease call Crohn's disease. This is a chronic inflammation of the intestine for those of you not in the know. I can go into the symptoms but if you think of your worst food poisoning episode and do that every day for years and years and years you will start to get the picture on how debilitating this disease can be.

She has been dealing with this since she was 14 ( now in her Thirties) As of January she is now in complete remission.

Where do I come in?

The group of Doctors that helped her get better are having a Symposium in Chicago in August. These are the cutting edge researchers working on this disease and seem to have an effective treatment. They will be presenting their research. They needed a way to get the word out. A website seemed to be the right way to go.

They don't just need a website however, their need is to get the information out to those that need it. Not only patients but the Gastroenterologists that are treating the patients. Their protocols are new and while they are effective, it seems that testing and verifying this treatment can be difficult and is only done in 3 places in the world.

For now, the website promoting the symposium will have to do. The docs are hoping for a good turnout and funding from donations. They need about $5 Million to run a fully sanctioned double blind study with controls and a significant population. So funding this will be a BIG deal. Grant applications will be the next goal.

An Exercise in Project Management and Customer Control

The Doctors are spread across the globe. We have one in New Zealand, one in Australia, A drug rep in Israel, another group in London. There is a Vet specialist in Wisconsin and also a microbiologist in New Mexico. Coordination has been challenging to say the least. E-mail has been a godsend and I've laid the ground to getting them all on Google + for hangouts with each other. Time zones are a nightmare.

I am also dealing with people of advance intelligence. Their information needs to be available and understandable by the common patient suffering from this disease. Most of what I read from them is well beyond my understanding. I have a challenge "dumbing it down" so that the general population can even understand what they are talking about. Google has been my friend in this. I have gained an entirely new perspective on medical research in the process. I won't say it's beyond my understanding but let's just say I have learned a lot in the past 2 weeks.

The Website

The website is been an interesting exercise. I have been using the Divi theme for a while now. Since it is versatile and relatively easy to customize any look, I decided to use that theme. My neighbor pulled together the information she had on the presenters for the symposium. She's also written considerable amount of the content for the site. So most of what I needed to do was organize, create the layout, and make it easy for people to find what they need on the site.

Of course, in the middle of this, Elegant themes decided to upgrade the theme. Not just a small upgrade, but a major overhaul. Let me know if you're interested in learning more about this theme. It is a premium theme and there is an affiliate program. So if you are entertaining this theme let me know and I will provide you with a link.

Wealthy affiliate has been a godsend. I created the original site as a siteRubix site and presented it to the doctors for their evaluation. There were certain limitations that caused a bit of grief by using a free site but in general this made a big difference by allowing them to view the site while off-line. This way the development was made much simpler provided a platform that we could adjust as the collaborators provided input.

Yesterday I took the site live. Since this is a customer site, I can't leave it on wealthy affiliate hosting so I moved it over to other hosting. I use the WP clone plug-in, created a full backup of the siteRubix site, and restored it to the new hosting. This process took about three hours to create a fresh WordPress installation on the new hosting, create the clone and restore the site on the new location.

What can you do to help?

We're not allowing comments on the site at this time. It would be quite helpful if the membership here at WA would share this site around. There is less than eight weeks before the symposium, and we would like to get the word out as far and wide as possible in this time.

Once the symposium is over, we will morph the site to be a general information site on MAP(mycobacteria avium sub species paratuberculosis) and its role in Crohn's disease. We are setting up interviews with the doctors that will be available as well as the full symposium recorded for posterity.

You can view the site here: the Crohn's infection http://thecrohnsinfection.org