posted
I am building a lyme disease social networking website.
Some features that it will have are: 1) A complete guide to identifying and overcoming lyme, written by users, that anyone can edit (like a wiki) 2) Forums 3) A news page where users can submit lyme related news from all over the web 4) A place where you can tell your personal story, and read other people's stories 5) A place for political activism where you can write to politicians directly from the website 6) Personal profile page with ability to send messages of advice to eachother
Please watch this space for more news about the site. Please suggest features that you would like to see.
Coming Soon
Posts: 6 | From NY | Registered: Apr 2007
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bettyg
Unregistered
posted
in building your website, i have a BIG SUGGESTION to make to you from LOW VISION folks like myself,
have it in ARIAL, 14 size so it is large, legible and has NO TIMESNEWROMAN in that runs all words together for a person like myself!
also solid background; no fancy backgrounds that create shadows, etc. there is nothing i hate worse than the background overpowering of written text!
could you send me by pm a sample of what you are doing so i can give you my LOW vision perspective whose eyes are greatly affected by my 37.5 years of chronic lyme?
big thanks for keeping an open mind to appeal to more users with "special limitations"!
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bettyg
Unregistered
posted
keebler, great point! woohoo drives me insane here and then people put them back to back.
do NOT have something like woohoo for us neuro lymies; it's way to much action for us....thank you!
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When you sign up for the site it asks you how long you've had Lyme disease and adjusts the font size accordingly. Just kidding. But seriously, please trust me not to make any stupid design choices. The site will have a lightweight, minimalist, simple interface; large readable fonts, and good colors.
I probably got Lyme when I was 2 years old. I'm 18 now and was diagnosed 6 months ago. As you can imagine, Lyme disease didn't give me the most successful high school career. I did manage to get into a college that I'm happy with, to study computer science, but deferred for 1 year to see if these antibiotics can make me think clearly again.
So I have nothing to do for 1 year, I have Lyme disease, and I can create websites. It is hard to find good information on Lyme disease all in one place online, and surprisingly cheap to have you own website.
Let me explain more about the content on the site: -The home page will be a blog, with frequently updated articles. The articles can be submitted by any member of the site. For example, you can submit a link to a Lyme news article with your opinion and members will be able to discuss it on the site. Any good submission can be promoted to the blog on the home page. -There will also be a section for you to post you personal story or just thoughts. Any good story could also be posted on the home page blog. -Right now there are very simple forums. you start a topic and people can reply. I'm debating whether to get more full featured forums like the one on this site. -My favorite section, and I think the most important, is the Lyme Guide. The Lyme Guide is essentially an online book which is meant to be an everything you would ever want to know about Lyme disease guide. Anyone can add pages to the guide, or edit the content on those pages.
Thats all for now. I'm working on users being able to send messages to each other and have their own profile pages.
I'd hate to discuss a feature which I don't know how to deliver, but I think it would also be great to have political 'contact your representative' forms like savetheinternet.com. On their site, you can even enter your zip code and automatically send a message to all your local newspapers.
Thanks I hope that answered some of your questions. I should have a URL of the site soon, where you can enter your email and be notified when the site launches.
Posts: 6 | From NY | Registered: Apr 2007
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trueblue
Frequent Contributor (1K+ posts)
Member # 7348
posted
quote:Originally posted by dereo: When you sign up for the site it asks you how long you've had Lyme disease and adjusts the font size accordingly.
Good luck with the website, dereo!
-------------------- more light, more love more truth and more innovation Posts: 3783 | From somewhere other than here | Registered: May 2005
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posted
I would moderate the site, although I don't expect it to need much moderation. If the site called for extra moderation, then I could easily give frequent and reliable contributers, who are interested, the ability to moderate.
"We're noted for that." Who is we?
Anyone could create a section of the forums or Lyme Guide dedicated to alternative medicine. News stories can be submitted about any topic. It would be of interest to the whole community, I'm not sure if it needs its own 'page'.
As for keeping the site up, don't worry about it. The technical version: I'm building the website on top of a content management system. What this means is that once the site is up, it manages itself without much work from my end. Even if i wanted to leave the site, it would take 2 clicks to put a few volunteers in charge, and they wouldn't have to be all that tech savvy.
Posts: 6 | From NY | Registered: Apr 2007
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bettyg
Unregistered
posted
please remember us neuro lymies who can not comprehend or read long solid blocks of text with no short paragraphs and double spacing in between.
example: what you described above was broken down but for someone like me, became a solid block of text since there were no double spaces between paragraphs. thank you!
it sounds really interesting, and thank you for chosing to do this!
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posted
Hi Dereo: Thanks so much for your efforts-- launching a site like this one is incredibly difficult and you deserve a big SMOOCH.
For my part-- I am not so much interested in the way things look-- which is entirely too prevalent these days-- people seem to care very little about content and a lot about haircuts and the way people or book covers look!! SOme won't even bother to look inside the book if the cover art is poor. A nice balance would appeal to everyone.
I like juicy content-- and lots of it-- the more detailed and insightful, the better for a reader like me.
So-- it would be great if you could have an advanced policy section for folks who want to really get down and dirty into policy issues and are not so much concerned with aesthetics.....which sometimes can be used as a red herring to distract from the real issues at hand......
Thanks again for your efforts and I look forward to contributing to your site!!! Posts: 696 | From New York | Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
It's hard to do market research on Lyme disease, so I ask you all:
Do you think that I will have a hard time obtaining an audience for a Lyme disease community?
Can anyone come up with an estimate for how many people will join?
Are there enough people out there to have a thriving community? And would the site be taking traffic away from other sites? (e.g. LymeNet) Would people be willing to move away from these sites they have been using for years even if it was to a much better site?
Posts: 6 | From NY | Registered: Apr 2007
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Lorima, I obviously know that. But would it would be nice to have something more than just forums?
Ruth, probably not. I plan on just paying for the hosting myself. I'd try ads, but you need a lot of traffic for them to work, and nobody likes ads.
Posts: 6 | From NY | Registered: Apr 2007
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posted
What would be helpful to me some days would be a site that categorizes topics covered in discussion in this forum and then provides some of the best quotes WITH LINKS to the orginal discussions so people can refer back to the quote in the context of the discussion.
Kind of a "knowledge base" structure. Forums are helpful, but lack structure. Also the search feature is so slow here.
So, there's my suggestion!
-------------------- When I lost my grip on Faith in the maze of illness, Hope gently clasped my hand and led on.
RuthRuth Posts: 478 | From California | Registered: Jan 2007
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