This page has been introduced to give users quick access to new developments in the Site Management System. We suggest that you check it each time you start a session. The latest updates will be inserted at the top of the page.
It’s a long time since we’ve updated the system, which is an excellent sign of its stability. However, the page for uploading a document to your site has been revised. If you try to upload a document with the same filename as one already on your site, you will not be allowed to do so. You have two options:
We hope this is clear. If you have any difficulties with future uploads, please contact us using the Suggestion/Support form.
We have added a link at the bottom of the Site Mamagement System home page which allows site editors to see the total number of page hits on their site for each day. This data can easily be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet for further analysis, such a inserting formulas for weekly or monthly totals.
We have added a link at the bottom of the Site Mamagement System home page which allows site editors to see links to all the current client sites, with the name, phone number and email address of the main contact for each site and the current reading from the site’s visit-counter.
Practices have the option to indicate whether each individual member of staff works at all surgeries and, if not, which they do work at. Hazel Taylor at Radford Medical Practice has pointed out that the surgeries page was not showing people who work at both or all premises. This has now been corrected for all sites.
Hazel also pointed out that where someone’s job title was ‘Other’, their other job title was not showing. This has been corrected.
Following an unfortunate accident in which a site administrator (who must remain anonymous to spare blushes!) switched off his/her own administrator/editor status, and so made it impossible for him/herself to log in to the Site Management System, this has been prevented: the relevant buttons now only appear on the Edit SMS/intranet user form for colleagues other than the person who is logged in.
To clarify things for practices with intranets, the Manage users pages and forms are now labelled to make it clear that site editors and administrators and authorised intranet users are all managed on the same form.
Thanks to Derby Road Health Centre, Nottingham, for suggesting the latest update. You can now upload a picture to appear on your About us page (the effect can be seen on the Derby Road site). Once it has been uploaded, copy and paste the filename (eg: ‘any_image.jpg’) in the box on the Edit site details form and the picture will appear as on the Derby Road site.
Thanks to Derby Road Health Centre, Nottingham, for suggesting the addition of the EMIS Access button. This is an option for practices using the EMIS clinical system, allowing registered patients to book appointments online and to use EMIS's alternative repeat-prescription ordering system.
Thanks to Emma Chellew and Anna Benner at Derby Road Health Centre, Nottingham, for triggering an upgrade of the About us area of the sites.
When entering or editing details of a member of practice staff, site editors can choose a job title from a dropdown menu: Doctor, Nurse, District Nurse, Health Visitor, Receptionist, Manager or administrative staff or Other. A note on the form now makes it clear that this controls which heading on the About us page the member of staff is listed under. The Other job title box has been renamed Specific job title; this can be left blank, but if a title is entered it appears after the name on the About us page and also on the individual's own page. The individual page format has been modified so that Nurse, District Nurse, Health Visitor and Receptionist appear as the page header, but for the other categories the person's name is the page header. This allows titles such as 'Practice Manager' to appear sensibly, but also allows specific titles such as 'Team Leader' to appear in addition to the generic title.
The folder list on the Site Management System home-page now shows folders in the same sequence as on your site's button bar. You can control this using the Sort order facility on the Edit folder form. Unsorted folders, or those with the same sort order value, are sorted alphabetically. The sort order value you have set is now shown against each folder name.
We have made this change while using the SMS ourselves to build the new version of the Sites4Professionals website. It makes organising the automatically-generated folder buttons much easier. We hope you find this as helpful as we have - and that you will visit the all-new Sites4Professionals site.
As part of this Summer’s marketing drive, we have completely rebuilt the Sites4Doctors website to include far more information – including all the new and improved features added in response to users' feedback – and hopefully to make it easier to understand. Please have a look and let us know what you think.
We have included links to all client sites, and also the comments some of you kindly supplied for the Trent Buying Group News, which I believe goes to press at the end of this week. Thanks to those who sent such positive feedback – it really is appreciated.
SMS users may find that the site gives you a clearer overview of the system.
We have upgraded our support service with the addition of Blackberry HandHeld technology, which means that your email queries and requests can be read and replied to wherever we are. The Blackberry is a pocket-size computer which is permanently connected to our email server via the GPRS mobile phone network. Incoming emails are 'pushed' to the Blackberry as soon as they reach the server, and generate an audible warning, just like text messages.
The details of main and branch surgeries are now presented far more effectively, thanks to the suggestions from Sukhi Ghattaora at Sunrise Medical Practice, Nottingam (http://www.sunrisemedicalpractice.co.uk/. Users now see a page showing just the names and addresses of all the practice's surgeries, which they can click for contact details and opening hours.
Sunrise's home-page has really nice photo-links straight to the details of each of its surgeries.
The styling of the web-page editor has been modified so that main headings and subheadings now show in blue, as they do on the actual site pages.
In response to a request from Sukhi Ghattaora at Sunrise Medical Practice, Nottingam (http://www.sunrisemedicalpractice.co.uk/, the choice of buttons has been increased. Sukhi pointed out that Surgery details might not be clear to all site users, so we have added Contact us and Opening hours. All three point to the same page and can be switched on and off using the buttons on the Edit site details form.
Wilson Street Surgery, Derby (http://www.wilsonstreetsurgery.co.uk/, is the first practice to ask for its existing web and email domain to be transferred to Sites4Doctors. This has now been done, providing continuity with existing mail addresses for functions such as repeat-prescription ordering. Mailboxes have been provided at no extra cost, including a ‘catchall’ box that will capture all other mail sent to ‘@wilsonstreetsurgery.co.uk’, regardless of what is in front of the ‘@’.
Wilson Street's intranet, which is now active (but password-protected) at http://intranet.wilsonstreetsurgery.co.uk. We are grateful to Sam Woodings for her hard work in helping us to fine-tune the intranet specification. As well as password protection, the system allows users and folders to be given any of five security/access levels. A folder is only accessible to users with the same or a higher security level, and - to avoid offending people - the buttons for higher-level folders are not even seen by users with a lower level.
Charnwood Surgery, Derby (http://www.charnwood-surgery.co.uk/) has also opted for an intranet. Thanks to Hayley Winfield for her contributions to the development.
In response to requests from Charnwood Medical Practice and Wilson Street Surgery, we have now implemented the planned practice intranet add-on to the package.
An intranet is a secure website which can only be seen by members of your practice team and can therefore be used with confidence for internal communication. It has a web address of the form intranet.yourpracticename.co.uk and requires a login ID and password for each user. Access can be restricted to selected areas of the site by giving each folder an access level and each user a security level: folders can only be seen by a user whose security level is equal to or higher than its access level. So - for example - you could have folders that are accessible to everyone, others that can only be seen by GPs, nurses and managers and others that are only available to GPs and the Practice Manager. To avoid offending low-level users, they never even see the buttons for folders above their levels.
The set-up and three-month hosting/support charge for an intranet is £100 (subject to LMC discount), and the annual hosting/support charge is £125. You can request an intranet set-up using the Support/suggestion form.
Thanks to Sam Woodings at Wilson Street Surgery, Derby, for alerting us to the fact that the patient’s email address was missing from the repeat-prescription request sent to practices. This has now been corrected on all sites. (Wilson Street's site is not yet live as their existing web address has to be transferred.)
Wilson Street’s intranet site is now being built – the first on Sites4Doctors. This will be a separate password-protected site with the address intranet.wilsonstreetsurgery.co.uk. We already have ideas for a number of innovative features for intranets, including a document-management system with update tracking and (programming skills permitting!) a holiday rota manager. Watch this space,,,
The ‘Search this site’ button has been replaced by a small form which allows a simple search to be made straight from whatever page the user is looking at. Below this is a link to the search page for ‘Advanced Search’.
A site search engine has now been installed on all sites, with a ‘Search this site’ button at the bottom of the button-bar. The Zoom search system that powers this facility can search the text of web pages, Word documents, PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and WordPerfect documents.
Users can enter one or more words in the box and choose to search for any or all of them. They can put double-quotes around phrases and search for any or all of a mix of words and phrases. They can also use the ‘*’ to represent any number of characters and the ‘?’ to represent a single character, so ‘surg*’ will find ‘surgery’, ‘surgeries’, ‘surgical’ etc and ‘fre?’ will find ‘Fred’ and ‘free’ but not ‘freckle’.
The results display highlights the search keywords with a yellow background.
The Comments and suggestions box has been substantially tidied up, and now deals properly with postings done anonymously and without email addresses. When previewed in the Site Management system, there is a link that allows editors to delete postings, so that anything inappropriate can be removed as soon as it is spotted (this resulted from discussions at practice visits to Radford Medical Practice, Nottingham and St Luke’s Surgery Nottingham on the 25 November, so thanks for the suggestion!).
Phase Two of the hit-counter system has now been completed. Every hit on every page is still logged so that you can see which of your pages are being used most (and least) via the Site Management System, but the hit-counter displayed on your pages now counts users' visits to your site, giving a much more realistic picture of the number of people using it.
Following a request from Steve O'Dare of Hawthorn Medical Practice, Skegness, the Folder active feature has been fully implemented. The checkbox is normally ticked for all folders, but you can now un-tick it so that the folder does not show on the button bar. This allows you to develop a whole new area of your site but to keep it invisible to users until you are satisfied with it. Then a single click to tick the checkbox will publish the whole area.
Yet another thankyou to Hazel Taylor of Radford Medical Practice, Nottingham, for identifying the need for more flexibility in the 'Surgery information' page. The 'Edit premises details' form now has an extra field called 'Notes' which you can use for a paragraph headed 'Additional information'. In Radford's case this is used to tell patients about different closing times during Trent University's term and vacation times.
Another thankyou to Hazel Taylor of Radford Medical Practice, Nottingham, for pointing out that page previews in the SMS are counted by the hit-counter, giving an artificial total. This has now been corrected: hits are only scored when pages are viewed via normal web access.
There is now a link at the bottom of the Site Management System home-page called Hit-count summary. This displays a table showing the total number of hits for each page of your site with a grand total at the bottom.
Thanks again to a suggestion from Steve O'Dare of Hawthorn Medical Practice, Skegness, a hit-counter system has been added to the sites. The counter appears by default at the bottom of the right-hand column on all site pages.
Like the other optional facilities, you can switch this on or off - in this case separately for your site home-page and for all the other pages - using the 'Edit site details' form. So if you don't want it at all, if you only want it on the home-page - or if you want to leave it until the hits have built up to a respectable total! - you can choose.
The hits are stored in the site database, and there will soon be a new link on the Site Management System home-page which will allow you to see how many hits there have been on every page of your site.
More thanks to Steve O'Dare of Hawthorn Medical Practice, Skegness! This time, it's for discovering that an error had crept into the facility for inserting images into web pages. This has now been corrected.
Steve is also the first site-owner to ask for a change to his site templates - a simple one to allow him to centre headings and subheadings. This has been done for his site only. If there are any stylistic changes you would like on your site, remember that this is included in the setup package, so please don't hesitate to ask via the Support/suggestion form.
Another thankyou to Hazel Taylor of Radford Medical Practice, Nottingham, for her suggestion that - for practices with more than one surgery - the Surgery details page should show which members of the practice team are based at each surgery. This has now been implemented. Multi-premises practices will find a new choice on the forms to set up new staff and edit existing staff, so that staff can be classified as working at all surgeries or just one. If a surgery is chosen, the choice will be indicated on that staff member's personal page (not GP personal pages, as we assume that the choice does not apply to doctors) and all staff based at each surgery will be listed on that surgery's page (with a link to the personal page). If practices do not wish to use this facility, they can simply ignore this choice, which defaults to 'all surgeries'.
Thanks to Hazel Taylor of Radford Medical Practice, Nottingham, for her valuable feedback on the repeat prescription ordering system. As a result:
In the process of upgrading the system, the response page has been improved and the return address on emails is the practice's repeat prescription email address.
Thanks to Steve O'Dare of Hawthorn Medical Practice, Skegness, for discovering that:
The main heading on every page except the SMS home page is now a link back to the SMS home page, and there is a small reminder link underneath.
The Help page for the Editize web-page editor, used in the forms to create and edit folders and pages, is now complete in first draft form. Please use this critically and feed back your comments using the Support/suggestion form.
The New document form has been improved, with additional information about the PDF995 software. This suite of programs from Software995 is available free (if you don't mind sponsors' advertisements popping up while you use it), and all three tools can be bought for just $19.95. The PDF995 program itself works like a printer, except that it saves a PDF version of any printable document, and PDFedit995 allows you to do all sorts of things like merging several PDFs into one, even if they were originally produced by different software packages (the front of the Sites4Doctors promotional flyer was produced by the superb XaraX vector graphics package and the back by Word, each was converted to PDF with PDF995 and they were merged with PDFedit995).
In response to a request from Charnwood Surgery:
The SMS home page has been reorganised and restyled:
A help page for the web-page editor has been started, with a link above the editor on all forms where it appears. This is not yet complete but already contains a great deal of helpful information and guidance.