Search Engine Updates, Blogs as Engagement Tools, and Responsive Design: Using the Latest Tools to Build an Effective and Engaging Public Health Website

With the abundance of developer tools in the marketplace, it’s comparatively easy to stage a public health website.  But it’s a completely different story when it comes to strategically and intelligently building a site that attracts the interest of the public and effectively informs concerning public health.  Three case studies will be presented that illustrate how effective web design using quality content can accomplish the goals of increasing awareness and bettering community health.  Case studies include a government website that saw a triple digit rate of traffic growth over a 12-month period because of the combined factors of responsive design, search engine-friendly content structure, and content that was in place to receive traffic from a major media event.  Another case study looks at how a blog can be a very strategic means of actively engaging a fast-growing audience with a specific need; and a final case study looks more closely at responsive sites and their role in increasing the types of traffic that come to a website.  Coming primarily from the standpoint of designing high traffic sites with strong content that can be marketed to specific audiences, this session is for public health executives, government officials, subject matter experts and others who desire to effectively communicate on a variety of health issues and needs.