FirstHealth — Nicholas Westby: Polymath Programmer

I was the lead backend developer of FirstHealth.org. Some of the more notable aspects of the project include:

The new site is built entirely in ASP.NET MVC (C# Razor) and all content is entered using the Umbraco CMS.
Hundreds of articles were imported from the legacy site. As the legacy site had no export function, I built a tool to scrape the articles from the old site, parsing out titles, images, and other meta-data as necessary.
I wrote web services for the frontend developers to use for dynamic functionality (e.g., site search, directory search, forms, and so on).
For better performance, various areas of the site use cached data, and I made the duration of all of those caches configurable in the CMS (even configuration of the cache is cached for a duration that is configurable).
Every page uses HTTPS. This was done to ensure better security for users and to improve SEO now that Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal.

FirstHealth Homepage

Features a categorized slideshow, an overlay menu, and an overlay search feature.

FirstHealth Locations & Wait Times

The website automatically gets the amount of time users can expect to wait in the emergency room for a given location. This is shown both on the homepage and on a dedicated ER wait times page.

FirstHealth Articles & Modules

The news, events, and articles are aggregated contextually throughout the site. Also, the modules at the bottom of the page are pickable on each page and cascade to child pages (they can also be selectively overridden).

FirstHealth Directory Search

The directory search is an AJAX-driven search application that allows users to search for doctors, hospitals, and support groups, giving various filter and sort options.

FirstHealth Pseudo-Overlays

All overlays on FirstHealth.org also act as pseudo-overlays. That is, they have URL's that can be visited as real pages (when viewed, those pages have the appearance of overlays). Users interacting with the site can click to open overlays, but search engines can also index overlays as pages with unique URL's.

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