Disaboom.com has come a long way since last year, we’ve gone through many design changes on the front end, have added lots of new content and features and have seen tons of new visitors and site members. It’s been a very exciting time for us and hopefully for you too. Disaboom isn’t much without its vibrant community, and we give a big shout out to you for being a part of this place and for sharing it with your friends and family.
It’s All About Speed
I want to share some exciting new developments with you: one of the things that our users have been very vocal about is Disaboom’s site speed. What we’ve heard from some of you is this: “We love the site, but it’s too slow! It takes forever to load!” We’ve had site speed as one of our top development priorities for a little while now and have made many changes on the site both visible and invisible to speed things up for you. First of all it’s important to note that 7% of our regular visitors use dial-up modems, so we needed to make sure that we were taking these users into account as much as possible.
We started by looking at load size of pages across the site and doing what we could to optimize that (reduce number of queries, number of image calls, etc). Many of our changes here, such as the New Community Page and the New Portal Pages, were designed in based off of things we learned while examining site page load times. The result for those pages is positive in that the pages are faster and they are cleaner and easier to use. In addition to those changes we also brought on Strangeloop to help optimize the delivery of our pages. You can read a press release about that here.
Finally, here’s some of the actual advancement we’ve made: 1) all of our pages have been optimized through Strangeloop so that their payload is 50% smaller, 2) most of our pages now load a couple of seconds faster than they did before, 3) the biggest and most complex pages on the site (like the community page and the home page) have seen even bigger speed gains and now load up to 50% faster. Strangeloop went into effect last week while Disaboom was presenting at Health 2.0. We’re not finished speeding things up, we are continuing to optimize Strangeloop and are also looking at ways that we can redesign other “heavy” pages on the site so that they’re even snappier.
Condition-Based Connections
One of our goals is to connect groups of people with shared affinities. For example—we’ve had women on the site for a long time with spinal cord injuries who had children while disabled as well as women with spinal cord injury who are currently pregnant or who are looking to get pregnant in the future. We want these people to connect. That’s why we started building Portals. Portals are designed to capture synergies and shared interests in the community.
Portals work by indexing every word in the entire site and then arranging that Intel, based off our semantic input, into dynamically generated summary pages. Portals are defined by words and phrases, and when such a phrase is present in a Discussion Forum it links, in a visually differential way, to the Portal Landing Page. Here’s a Fibromyalgia Portal. The page collects related blogs, discussions, article, groups and user profiles and effectively connects people interested in a particular topic to similar content throughout the community.
As you can see we’ve been very busy here at Disaboom. The site’s much faster, we have a fresh community and home page and we’ve made a major effort at connecting people to stuff they’re interested in with the new Portal Pages. Anything else?
Chat
This is what some of you have been waiting for! We’ve been looking at solutions to bring chat back to the site. We want to be able to provide a civil environment for people to connect and we think we finally have a way to do that. Stay tuned for Chat to return to the site by (cross your fingers) the end of November.
Thanks for making Disaboom.com what it is! Have fun cruising around the site and don’t forget to tell your friends about this remarkable community.
