Chiropractic Homepage

by Michael Dorausch

Last month I was contemplating the idea of converting a web site, that I invested about $3000 of development on, into an open source model, or something that would be available via a creative commons license. The first web site that was converted over was the template for chiropractor website (see link to view site).

The web site pretty much has everything a chiropractor could seek when it comes to building a successful online destination for existing patients, as well as new patients. The site was converted over to creative commons licensing in the month of June, 2000 and programmers are working now to generalize all of the template pages so that chiropractors could basically fill in their own information, resulting in a great chiropractic web site made in a very short time.

The greatest advantage of all this is that the web site is free. That’s what the open source movement is all about. It may not be traditional open source like the development of software, but in the spirit of sharing, it’s the closest thing the chiropractic profession has when it comes to web design.

There is an article posted on June 30 titled “Giving away my chiropractic website” which has most of the pertinent information about the decision to make the site open source and share it with others.

What we will be doing here at the chiropractic homepage project will primarily be a focus on improvements made to the homepage of this recently made free web site. Taking a look at the homepage, some changes are in order such as flipping out the graphic (which has an office logo on it) with a text header that can also be used as the title tag.

We also like to see the graphic image version of a phone number (not good design principles for a web site) changed out to a text version that could easily be edited by a web site administrator. There are several other changes requiring a templating of sorts but those of the first two that are recommended in the process.

This will be an exciting project as chiropractors have already been signing. Everyone is going to get a free chiropractic website, only time will tell on how many will actively participate in making improvements and keep the project moving forward.