MedNous

MedNous is a print publication and a website for medical entrepreneurs in Europe. The name is derived from the Greek word for knowledge – nous – and the English word, medical. With the goal of creating a brand new website capable of offering improvements all round, for both their publication subscribers and the MedNous publication team, we got straight to work in producing the new site in Drupal. We are also now working to evolve the website over the long-term, with new features and interface refinements - just the sort of way we believe a project like this should be done!

Drupal - the right fit

Since the MedNous team were looking for improvements to all aspects over their previous website, including design, user interface and the publishing workflow, it was obvious that the Drupal content management software would be an ideal fit.

MedNous offers its news to subscribers primarily through its print publication and the website serves as a tool for these subscribers making access to additional content, search and the location of topic categorised articles far simpler. In addition, MedNous make available a regular number of free articles and resources and so flexibility over access permissions was of great importance.

By capitalising on Drupal's modular architecture and by customising features in an exact way, Five Mile was able to deliver an easy-to-use web publishing system, ideal for the deployment of freely available and subscription based news articles. Moving forward, we are looking forward to working with MedNous to further develop the site with enhanced features that will aid in the location of both the latest and archived content.

The website gathers in one place current news and reference information. Some of the information on the website is re-written and carried over into the print publication. The website is a place where medical professionals will find links to helpful organisations, such as grant funders, venture capitalists, industry associations and the like. Subscribers can look up past articles from the print publication in PDF form or even print out an entire issue. The website is also a convenient way to write a letter to the editor.

It has been a joy to work with the MedNous team and we have been really pleased to see how easily they were able to adopt a completely new way of managing their online news publishing. The response from subscribers has also been very positive who have been pleased to see the content delivered through a far more attractive and user-friendly interface.

A Transition

Since MedNous are adding to their news archive on a daily basis, it was essential that we were able to offer a clean development and transition process from the old site to the new. With close to 800 news, appointments, events and general web pages, we had both the task of porting existing content across from a completely bespoke content management system, as well as the need to stay current with articles that continued to be added to the old site whilst the new one was in development.

By spending time in the early stages of the project to script up some methods of porting content, we were able to always get our development version of the site in sync with the live version. This was great for the development process, since it meant that everyone involved was able to quickly see how well features and navigation were working and progressing.

Tackling New Features

As with any project, it is always tempting to try and add all the new ideas into the pot for the release of a new site. If we were building a brand new site from scratch, without any history, then this would be possible to build into the development plan but MedNous is a site already in a mature state. Time was also of great importance. MedNous were keen to see the entire project, from our first meeting, through to training, through to going live, all delivered within a maximum of a two month timespan. This meant we needed to keep a cap on what work was going to go into the first release of the new site.

The main complexities for this build were around the need to port from a completely bespoke CMS on a different platform and getting the new CMS (Drupal) to behave in exactly the way we needed it to, leaving plenty of time for testing and making sure that search engine optimisation wasn't going to be adversely affected when going live. The last thing anyone wants is error 404 pages from all the long-indexed search results.

On this basis we advised for this first phase of development work to concentrate solely on building the new site to deliver 'only what you have now' but along with the necessary improvements that the Drupal software will bring. We were able to introduce a few new minor features and we certainly enhanced the way existing features worked but the underlying goal was to keep things as simple as possible for now. Let the new features and tools come later!

This process worked incredibly well and we were able to deliver the site on time and on budget. The new phase of evolving design and features is now under way and we will no doubt be able to post further news on this project over the coming months.

We are really grateful to MedNous for allowing us to have the opportunity to deliver this project and we wish them every success for the future.

MedNous.com