Wall-to-Wall Studios Designs and Develops Website for Heritage Valley Health System
Wall-to-Wall Studios designed & developed the website for Heritage Valley Health System, a $450 million integrated delivery network providing comprehensive health care for residents of Allegheny, Beaver, Butler and Lawrence counties, in Pennsylvania; eastern Ohio; and the panhandle of West Virginia. Heritage Valley offers a broad range of medical, surgical and diagnostic services at its two hospitals, Heritage Valley Sewickley and Heritage Valley Beaver; in 72 physician offices; and 14 community satellite facilities.
The website was developed using BlokBlok CMS, a Ruby on Rails + Javascript content management system, and integrated the use of Responsive Design to optimize the user experience for desktop/laptop, mobile devices and iPad/tablet. The Responsive Design website approach responds to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation by using a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries. As the user switches from their laptop to iPad, the website automatically switches to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. Other project notes include:
- The previous website was nearly 8 years old and contained 700+ static pages that were managed & updated with Dreamweaver by one individual.
- The user-centric approach was developed by W|W using personas, user journeys and extensive competitive research ensuring that the website gets the right information to the right audience.
- The new website leverages taxonomy and tagging to create powerful relationships between doctors (and medical groups), locations and their services.
- The tagging system for news posts enable specific news stories to publish throughout the site's "related news" section.
- The Patient Activity Monitor, a 3rd party API that was integrated into the new site, uses html5 localstorage to save the user's preferences on their machine to avoid the server having to save anything.
- W|W utilized the Modernizr plugin to gracefully load-in technologies where possible and create fallbacks for older browsers.
- The web application automatically checks to determine if the site is viewed on a retina device, such that it can deliver higher quality icons throughout the site.
- Interactions are written/coded to work elegantly with a mouse as well as on a touch device (while other web applications use a different navigation for tablets).
- The web application environments are self-contained and managed by Puppet, Vagrant and Capistrano.
- The site search is powered by the open source search server Sphinx, which is a feature rich, full-text search engine.
View the Heritage Valley website.
