Iarfhlaith Kelly – Code agus Craic

The Tuesday Push is a bi-weekly cooperative effort by bloggers to help get the word out about the chosen web service in a co-ordinated way. This week it’s RevaHealth in the hot seat.

RevaHealth is a portal website for people who want to ‘find and compare health and cosmetic clinics anywhere’.

First Impressions

RevaHealth is a portal site, but it has a razor sharp focus on healthcare. and in particularly dental and cosmetic clinics. This is a good thing. Like I’ve said before, having a niche a focusing on it is crucially important on the web.

Overall the site has a deliberate purpose, helping you to find the right clinic. The homepage has a clear call to action and prompts users to search for the type of clinic they’re looking for in a specific geographical area.

The results are clear, informative and provide user contributed ratings on most of them.

The Test Run

I wanted to see how useful RevaHealth would be in helping me pick a suitable dentist in my area, so I took it for a test run. To start, I didn’t go to RevaHealth, I went to Google, and typed ‘Dublin Dentist‘ into the search box.

Hey presto! RevaHealth came up on the number one spot for those keywords and deep linked to their internal search results page for ‘Dublin Dentist’. – Someone’s been working hard on their SEO!

Once I arrived at the RevaHealth search results I picked the clinic with the best star rating (Smiles Dental Spa). From there I could see a lot more detailed information about the clinic. Things like:

• a Google Map showing their location;
• a detailed review of the clinic;
• a gallery of photographs of the clinic;
• a full price list of the services offered;
• and their opening hours.

I wanted to compare this against the information on the Smiles Dental Spa website and amazingly they gave almost none of the same information over there. Not even their opening hours.

Summary

I think the guys behind RevaHealth are onto a good thing here. They’re providing easily accessible information, that’s community driven, in a niche area, that’s difficult to find anywhere else.

They’ve got a clear business model and are already earning revenues from advertising and corporate accounts.

Well done to Caelen and his team. I wish you guys the very best of luck with the business.

Almost everyone who succeeds, fails the first time. In fact they usually fail many times before they get it right. Failure, it seems, is a key ingredient in the success of any business, project or person.

What can we learn from this? Well, if anything it’s that failure is just a stepping stone to success. And there are few better examples of this than Abraham Lincoln. The man failed at almost every point in his life, right up until he became the U.S. President, and the most powerful man in the world at that time. See for yourself.

One of my heroes, Guy Kawasaki summed it up nicely when he said “if you succeeded at everything you did, what would you have learned along the way”?

This truth became clear to me when I tried to build my first pc. I naively went out and bought a processor and a motherboard, stupidly thinking they would just ‘work’ together. Of course they didn’t. I then bought a system fan and a few other bits and pieces like memory and a graphics card. There was problems with all of those too. But despite the challenges, I over came them and I learned a ton about computer hardware in doing so. And to be honest, I’m not so sure I would have learned as much if everything had worked together first time. The end result was a killer system that I knew inside out.

The bottom line is, don’t worry about failing, just make sure that when it happens you get up and try again. You’ll eventually get it. Remember, you’re always stronger and wiser the second time around.

Even Michael Jordan knows that failure is just a part of success: [Thanks Dave].

I was going through some old folders on my laptop this week, tidying things up and I found some old scans that I’d done of my school journal covers. 

Channelled Expression

The journal cover was one of the few ways I could express my individuality in school. So, I made the most of it, and it’s amazing how creative you can be on such a small canvas when you’re restricted by so many [school] rules.

I think most teenagers have a natural urge to express their individuality and I was no different. It’s a pity blogging wasn’t around back then because I can only imagine the type of controversial, angst ridden rants that I would have put down. Especially after a tough day or a row with my parents. It would have been really cool to be able to look back on them now.

But, it wasn’t, so all I have are these scrap book collections stuck onto the covers of my old school journals. 

These young bloggers don’t know how good they have it.

Forgotten Interests

Seeing these old covers also reminds me how much passion and I had for my hobbies at the time. Mostly mountain biking, dirt jumping, rock music and dry comedy. It makes me want to bring back some of those interests and use them as fuel for my life at the moment. Whether it be for fun, for work, or just plain living.

These quirky interests are what makes us different from everyone else. They make us us, and gives us our individuality. The Internet is a massive place and a world where everyone tries to create more noise, bigger hype and generate more interest then those around them (they might not admit to it, but they are) and it’s your individuality and quirkiness that will help you get noticed.

So if you’ve got some old school journal covers, works of art as a kid, silly old recordings, or funny moments caught on camera why not take them out and dust them off, because it’s those kinds of things that make you unique.

First off, just in case there’s any misunderstanding. This IS an April Fools’ post. But unlike the others I’ve read today this NOT a joke, it’s a rant.

The April Fools’ tradition is a complete. Waste. Of. Time (say it slowly). It’s a waste of time for the people playing the jokes and it’s an even bigger waste of time for those who fall for them.

It’s not even midday yet and already I’ve been bombarded with wind-ups on the radio, in the press, and online. These fictitious stories have wasted my time, annoyed me, and confused me. Some of them are very believable, at least a the start of the article. They usually get more ridiculous as you read down through them, testing the audience on what they can get away with.

Take Advantage

My message to everyone reading this is to take advantage of all this goofing off and to use it to make grounds on everyone around you taking part in this farce. I might come off here sounding like the guy that ruined the party, but come on people! We’re in a recession and the last thing we can afford to do is spend a whole day of the year playing jokes on each other.

They say that when there’s fire in the streets, buy property. Well when there’s people goofing off all around you it’s time take advantage and gain some ground on your competitors.

Ignoring Today’s Press

I get distracted with my RSS feed at the best of times, but to read the drivel that’s been coming through on blogs and news sources that I admire and respect is just too much. So, I’ll be ignoring all media sources for the rest of the day. In the mean time I’ll be busy developing my business, doing deals, and earning money.

Enjoy the rest of April Fool’s people. And like they say in Dragon’s Den: I’m out.

With good design, the user instinctively knows what to do next. Everything from a web app to a door handle. Pretty much everything we use. For example, when you see a tap you already know how to turn it on. All it needs is a twist.

If we use the conventions that have gone before, people will know what to do. It’s simple right?

Well, not quite.

For instance, what about innovation? Where does that fit in? How can we move forward if we rely on the rules that already exist? It’s a really difficult question but one way to answer it is to show you what not to do. Sometimes, in an attempt to break convention, to create something new, the designer gets it wrong. So wrong in fact that an action that used to be simple actually becomes more confusing then before. Regression in it’s truest sense.

Unwanted Innovation

Recently I was in a hotel bathroom and noticed this message above the sink.

If a tap needs instructions so people know how to use it, then that’s a FAIL in my book. The tap problem was solved way back in the late 19th century. The original tap design works. People know how to use it. They don’t need instructions to figure it out.

Designing a tap that looks like a miniature hair dryer just confuses people.

Lets not over engineer things to the point of confusion. If the problem is solved, leave it alone. There are plenty of other problems out there just begging for our attention.