Group items tagged

Overview: WebMD is a website designed to provide very general and basic information (not necessarily medical advice) for patients about health problems and healthy eating. As far as credibility goes, I do not doubt much of the information provided, but if you are looking for real answers to medical questions, this is not your website. Fortunately all content is free. It would be a good site to look at to find out what a certain disease is, what the symptoms are and how to go about dealing with it (drug names, etc.) and when to call a doctor. I think overall it is a good site for basic medical information but I would not rely on it to solve any medical problem, as its' purpose is not clinical based. Design Summary: From a first look, there is a lot going on in this webpage. Pictures are flashing back and forth, ads are flashing on the sides of the page and there is a lot of different colors and different sizes of texts. It is fairly organized however and is easy to find what you are looking for relatively quickly. I had trouble finding a list of sponsors and all I could find was a statement on the information tab which said, "We allow third parties to provide funding for WebMD to independently create information about certain topics within a specified health category". Also the ads on the site were mostly for drug companies, which cause some bias. The site worked the same in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Finding contact information was easy enough (at the very bottom of the page in small text) but I could not find any means of contacting them except for email.

Overview: It is very obvious upon entering this webpage who it is designed for, as it states in bold at the top of the page within tabs: "For Clinicians, For Patients, For Institutions, For Educators". I'm not sure it could get clearer than that. Also very obvious is the purpose. The biggest words on the page are: "Tap into the world's largest clinical community". I think this is a very credible website because all of the articles and websites within the main website are edited and written by doctors (MD). The biggest downside to this website is that you must subscribe to the website to see all of the content and a subscription is very expensive. Design Summary: From my first look, this site appears simple, yet very easy to navigate. There aren't a lot of bright colors or images to distract from the information of the page, which is beneficial, because you can find what you are looking for immediately. At the bottom of the page, the site provides a list of sponsors or partners including; Society of General Medicine, The Endocrine Society, American Academy of Family Physicians, Wolters Kluwer, etc. I had no problem using the website in Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer. The information is very up to date (as the name suggests!). Finding contact information is also simple (1-click) and they provide a phone number, fax number, many special purpose email addresses, and an address for an office in the United States, as well information for their international offices.