Case Study: Mayo Medical Laboratories

Last summer, CWS worked with Mayo Medical Laboratories to redevelop the structure of MayoMedicalLaboratories.com, and we have continued to support the expansion of its offerings. We put a lot of effort into the architecture of this site's codebase, and recent statistics have shown that these efforts are paying off.

Overall traffic to the site has doubled, but even more interesting is a six-fold increase in traffic specifically referred by search engines over an eight-month period. More recently, we've worked to develop a system for public access to the catalog of medical tests offered by MML, and this tool is already drawing nearly half of the site's traffic.

Here are a few of the strategies employed to achieve these measurable results:

• Good separation of content and style. Most people know that a Web page is driven by some underlying code that's not usually displayed. But what's not always understood is that not all code serves the same function. Of course the actual text you see on a page is included, but a good portion of the code that's loaded into your Web browser is about style -- the way a page looks. When a search engine looks at the page, it doesn't care about style; content is king. In modern Web design, it's possible to almost completely separate style code from written content, but this practice isn't always followed well. When it is, the results can be dramatic. In addition to giving search engines a clearer picture of content, code separation can significantly reduce the time required to load pages and make changes far easier to implement. It also opens the possibility of repurposing content for alternative devices, like mobile or print versions, without duplicating the content.
• Appropriate use of structure. The third type of code that makes up a Web page represents its structure. Many types of structure can end up yielding the same visual result. Looking at a building from the outside, you might not know if its studs were made of wood, steel, or Styrofoam. But that doesn't make all three building materials equally sound. The same is true of Web pages; the underlying structure can have a big impact on accessibility and maintainability. It's also particularly helpful for allowing search engines to assign context to words. For example, human beings rely on visual cues like text size and color to identify headings and other important words on a page. Search engines (not to mention visually impaired human beings) can't do this, so they rely on the document's structure to determine what's important.
• Internationalization. When websites aim to attract a global audience, it's important to correctly encode and structure multilingual content. This improves performance with international search engines and also ensures that pages display consistently across a diverse range of platforms and browsers.

CWS believes in producing Web sites and applications that are focused on meeting business objectives and producing measurable results. Contact us for a risk-free assessment.

Launch: Mayo Medical Laboratories

CWS has recently completed the rollout of Mayo Medical Laboratories.com. This site, produced in record time through the collaborative efforts of many different parties, represents the latest of several projects we have jointly developed with MCSI.

Highlights include client-centric information architecture, internationalization, and a development framework that can be easily extended and maintained as website objectives evolve.

Additional projects for MML are currently underway.