OSF Global Services
Successful technological integration boosts visibility for online community
Our client, an online start-up based in New York, needed a solution for its online canine health & wellness information site – DoggedHealth. OSF Global Services managed to integrate successfully all the functionalities and design features with the technology behind this website, to make DoggedHealth a dynamic and representative online community for dog lovers.
The Client
DoggedHealth is a New York based internet start-up and it is now one of the most comprehensive and authoritative canine health and wellness sites on the Internet. It is both an information resource as well as a community empowering users to make educated healthcare decisions for their dogs. All content is provided by a vet or, when appropriate, a certified trainer.
Elizabeth Ross, CEO, DoggedHealth
"Everyone who works on this project, as well as the company's CEO, is available 24/7 and 365 days a year. The fact that we were able to work with people as skilled, energized, professional and proactive as everyone at OSF has proven to be a major component in our company's success. We feel confident putting our technology needs in the hands of the OSF team. They go above and beyond to anticipate issues before they occur and interact seamlessly with all members of the DoggedHealth team. They tackle projects with an eye to detail and offer a keen understanding of our larger objectives.”
The Idea
The idea behind DoggedHealth is to provide dog lovers with competent and relevant information on the health and wellness of their pets. The website is organized into multiple sections, from diseases and nutrition, to first aid and advice on choosing a dog. In addition to this, a community is being developed for dog lovers, where they can upload pictures and videos, exchange ideas on forums and get more tips on dogs.
The Challenge
The main challenges behind this project appeared in relation to the Joomla! and KickApps technologies used. During the first two months of the online implementation of this website, the OSF Global Services team had to come up with flexible ways to integrate all the design in Joomla! Furthermore, for the Community section of DoggedHealth, our team of professionals had to customize KickApps to fit with the applications that the website wanted to provide to its users.
The Solution
The OSF Global Services team worked for two months to implement the website online, and make sure it ran smoothly. Changes were made rapidly, making DoggedHealth very user friendly and all the information very accessible.
After the website was functioning online, at our client’s request, our team came up with new ideas and implemented new functionalities. The most important of these is the Diagnostic DogSM - the profile of a dog, segmented into the main body parts, which the users can click on to bring up relevant symptoms and/or diseases associated with the specific body part. In the first development phase of this application, users could only find information on diseases associated with the body part on which they had clicked. Now they can also search by symptoms and multiple body parts thanks to the complex algorithm introduced by the OSF Global Services programmers to allow user to get better, more comprehensive information.
Technologies
Joomla! KickApps
The Results
DoggedHealth has been growing by an average of almost 25% over each of the past several months. Numerous of these visitors are also registered users and members of the Community section of the website. DoggedHealth continues to grow into becoming one of the leading online canine lovers’ communities.