It depends on which unit you belong to, what the general strategy for that unit is and what specific needs you have. A web site, as simple as it sounds, is composed of many specialties, and various groups at Duke are aligned to meet your needs.

 

If you belong to an education and research unit (schools, departments, divisions, research centers, institutes), we create your web site, application or portal. Education and research falls under School of Medicine and conforms to School of Medicine branding.

 

If your web site is specifically targeted to patients (care unit, hospital, clinic, program, doctor’s office), patient experience and entry is centralized at dukehealth.org and you need to contact Duke Creative Services at info@dukecreative.org (919.419.3270).

 

If your need is specific to patient-related application functionality (patient forms, reports etc.), it will be part of the Patient Portal initiative.  You can contact us, and we will engage the program coordinators.

 

If you are outside of the branding restrictions (ex: personal research labs) and you can build a web site from the ground up all by yourself, you can contact Duke Office of Information Technology (OIT) for a free web space.

 

If you have videos and podcasts to link up to your web site, you can contact OIT Digital Media Solutions to request hosting space. We will link to the streaming videos and podcasts from web sites we've built, per your requirements. OIT Digital Media Solutions also has information on video capturing and web conferencing.

 

If you need images and custom photography for your site, you can contact Duke Photography or Duke Medicine Creative Services.

You need to be authorized by the site's content owner for access to change content on your web site. The content owner is, most likely, the person in your unit who worked with us in building the site. You will be using a web-based WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to change content, which is a simple MS Word-like tool.  If you have authorization, you can easily add sub-pages and graphics, upload files, make hyperlinks, move content around and peform the most common editing tasks by yourself.

 

Increasing visibility of your site in search results such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN search engines greatly depends on how you structure your web site and how you define your content (called search engine optimization). When you are populating content, some of the search engine optimization techniques will help you make your site more visible.

 

Read more about search engine optimization