The CSRF has just launched this new website that you are viewing and along with that, we’ve updated our look! This includes a brand new logo and an updated print newsletter format.
Thanks to an unrestricted educational grant from Corcept Therapeutics, we have this new website up and going! Our original logo has been around since 1995 and was generated mostly because we needed something. At that point, we had about 20 members and lacked the resources to even consider help from a professional. Here we are in late 2013, and we’ve made a lot of progress in the past years! We thought that with lauch of a new website, it was time to give our logo a more contemporary feel. This time, after familiarizing themselves with our website and Cushing’s, there was a great deal of thought that went into the logo and site design on the part of the design firm. You can think of our logo as showing progression. Going from left to right is much like what happens when Cushing’s symptoms improve. You could also think about it as a progression from a large tumor causing Cushing’s symptoms to elimination of the tumor. Or going right to left, you can envision the progression of knowledge and medicines to treat Cushing’s as well as the personal growth one may experience due to their journey through Cushing’s.
In designing the website, primary importance was placed on being able to find the needed information as quickly as possible, which meant brigher headlines and more organization of the website content. Below is an article from the CSRF newsletter that further discusses our new website!
What’s New on the Homepage?
You can navigate the site using either the top menu or through the footer at the bottom. Watch the News and Spotlight sections for current news and events. You can read more about our new logo design under the Spotlight. Under Quick Links, you can submit your story to us. The icons next to the search box will let you email, facebook, etc. content to your friends. The icons in the footer will take you to our facebook page, the forum or let you contact us. You can also contact us using Contact Us under About the CSRF in the top menu. We’ve also added a more extensive “For Medical Professionals” section which may be of interest to your physicians and a privacy policy that tells you what we do or mostly don’t do with any information you provide us.
The homepage now includes a “Find the Resources You Need at Every Stage” bar directly below the main content. From our website statistics, we found that a number of visitors were viewing our site for the first time. We wanted to make it easy for everyone to quickly find the information they needed. Clicking one of the tabs in this bar will guide viewers through a description with links to the information on our website that is most pertinent to that stage.
How will information be easier to find?
While most of the content from newsletters going back to 1995 was available on our old site, it was difficult to find information specific to an area of interest. For that reason, we divided the Doctor’s Articles (longer, detailed articles) and Doctor’s Answers (usually short answers to your questions) into categories, for example diagnosis, recurrent Cushing’s, etc. (Screen shot – Doctor’s Articles – Recovery). For example, if you are looking for information on Recovery from Cushing’s, you can select Doctor’s Articles from the top menu, then Recovery from the sidebar and that will give you a list of articles on Recovery that may be of interest to you. Please note that as of the writing of this newsletter, not all Patient Stories on our old site have been transferred to the new site, but we are presently working on this as well as improving the search of patient stories.
What happened to the Member Services area?
We are still working on the new member services area that will provide the services that were available through Member Services on the old site. Because the old site was experiencing so many difficulties and for the most part, not usable to obtain information on Cushing’s, we decided to go ahead and launch the new site without a completed Member Services area. We will continue to work diligently on this section and if you have an email address on file with the CSRF, you will receive an email when the new Member Services area is available. It is our intention that through the new Member Services area, you will be able to view past issues of the print newsletter, obtain a list of patients to contact, send group emails, and alter your profile. In the meantime, if you are looking for other CSRF members that might be able to help you, please use the Contact Us form or join the forum.
So what is a forum and how does it work?
The Forum is new to the CSRF and we are excited that it provides a new way of communication between our members! Please use it! You can access the forum by clicking on the large Forum picture on the homepage. Anyone visiting our website can view the forum, however, to post in the forum, you need to be a member of the CSRF. If you are an email or full member of the CSRF and have an email address, it is our intention to have already included you as a forum user. When that happens, you will receive (or may have already received) an email with instructions as to your user name and password, so you can post in the forums. These forums are moderated. Because they are moderated, comments will not be posted immediately, but we hope to make this process as rapid as possible, while keeping the content appropriate. You can select from several topics, for example, What’s recovery like? and you can check a box to be notified if there is another comment regarding this topic. If there is not a topic for what you want to discuss, you can start a new topic. If you decide to post in the forum, please take a few minutes to understand the rules of use, which is the first forum topic.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.