Creation of the medical portal Health UA

Design and creation of the medical portal website for the largest publishing house Health of Ukraine, which includes periodicals for doctors, as well as several online publishers. Period of work: July-December 2020 Go to the site: https://health-ua.com/

About the client

The customer of the development of the new version of the site, including the new design and technological solutions, is the largest publishing house Zdorov'ya Ukrainy, which includes periodicals for doctors, as well as several online publishers.

Task

The portal site health-ua.com has been operating for more than 15 years by now, and by the time the tender was opened, the site was running on the Laravel framework and had an outdated design that was not adaptive for mobile devices. Despite the initially high-quality work of our predecessors, the employees of the publishing house had a number of difficulties and limitations, the solution to which was supposed to be implemented by significantly reworking the framework and refining the missing but necessary functionality. However, having encountered a number of difficulties related to the features of Laravel, the management of Health of Ukraine. Medical Visions, it was decided to develop the portal on a simpler base, which nevertheless assumed a fundamental upgrade of functionality.

Solution

Thanks to the experience and understanding of the specifics of medical marketing, our first task was to create a contact working group, which on the customer's side included a project curator, as well as a group of testers and a project manager, on the part of the WEB-MACHINE company - a project manager, in view of the complexity of the project, a curator in the person of the technical director, a designer, a group of four developers, a specialist in parsing and transferring data, copywriters, an SEO specialist, and a marketer.

At the stage before the start of work on writing the technical specifications, a decision was made to choose CMS - WordPress, in view of the flexibility of settings and our experience in creating aggregators and marketplaces on this CMS.

During the entire development period, the current site continued to operate on the main domain, while the test one was initially on our servers, then transferred to the Customer's dedicated server.

Development Features

In addition to a number of technological know-how that our team had to deal with for the first time, and moreover, we did not find similar solutions on any of the similar projects known to us, data transfer was especially difficult. In view of the significant difference between the structures of the current and designed sites, as well as the existing errors and confusion on the current site (there was no division of materials into language versions, about 50% of the design taxonomies were missing, as well as more than 80% of the data in the structure of the documents of the materials, which should have been the basis for sorting and keys for distribution in the corresponding sections (about 1700 parameters) on the new site), it was decided to use parsing methods. For this, several programs were created in C++, and the parsing was carried out in stages. In total, more than 112 GB of data were transferred, including media materials, as well as the database itself (more than 3 GB), which underwent a significant structural transformation.

The structure of the updated site increased several times, new taxonomies were created, including sorting by data types, new access levels and roles were created for users (18 access levels), material filters, interactive calendars in the personal sections cabinets, with advanced features in premium packages.

Personal cabinets and flexible settings were based on taking into account all specializations of doctors, for each group of which subscriptions were created from combinations of all existing data taxonomies that took into account their interests. In addition, internal chats and many other functions were created for closed access, an overview of which we do not have the right to disclose.

SEO

In addition to redesigning and developing a new platform, we were faced with the task of speeding up the site, which was accomplished by:

• server settings
• optimizing the database
• speeding up the platform itself
• optimizing server response time
• implementing caching and other methods.

All existing meta tags and metadata of the site were also transferred, internal linking and navigation were improved, external links were preserved, and redirects from abolished sections and pages were worked out.