GoutPal.com 2009 Roadmap

GoutPal.com has grown beyond the constraints of its original platform, and it is time to move. Most of the reasons are of a technical nature, so I will not bore fellow gouties with tales of website planning, design and development, or at least not here.

On this page, I will focus on the new benefits that are coming to GoutPal.com.

The reason for the move is quite simple.

The gout site has more information than is easy to maintain, and I need to add much more. Not only are there many new developments in the world of gout, but the gout forum generates lots of new information every week.

That new gout information needs to be incorporated into the guides at GoutPal.com. The increasing gout guidance has to be easier to find.

Gout Sections

First off, is the need to focus on quick answers to gout questions. Most of these are urgent “please help my gout” questions that have common recurring themes. A top quality, real-life, gout FAQ is one cornerstone of the new site. Other cornerstones are article collections for Gout Cures, Gout Diet, and Gout Symptoms.

The rest of the site, mainly gout research, gout news, and gout information fall into the Gout Related section. Finally, there are Gout Highlights – those ultra-significant gout articles that are so unique, so popular, or just plain special, that they have to be highlighted.

Gout FAQ's And More

At first, these will be existing pages, categorized in new ways. Then will come many new articles, and comprehensive key-point summaries. The whole categorization process is different, with articles easily slipping into as many sections as they are relevant to, making it much easier to find related information.

Related gout information is the biggest new improvement to help you find relevant gouty facts and guidance. To be truly effective, the related information must be multi-dimensional, so I am introducing additional gout categories – one long-promised, another brand new.

UDRP

Uric acid - crystal Deposits - immune Reaction - gout Pain

When you truly understand how different aspects of gout relate to each other, you have the best framework for planning your gout treatments and assessing their benefits. UDRP is the unique GoutPal explanation of the Gout Pain Pathway. The new platform allows infinite categorization, but I think two is enough – Gout Sections and UDRP. For everything else there is…

Gout Tagging

All GoutPal.com articles are already tagged with keywords, but they are largely hidden from most visitors. GoutPal.com 2009 exposes these tags, and adds many more, so that you can easily see all articles that feature a specific aspect of gout. This makes it easy to find, for example, all Treatment, Diet and Symptoms articles that focus on Uric Acid Lowering.

Gout Search

If category browsing isn’t for you, the search features will be improved to give you 4 levels of search,: -

1. GoutPal.com search
2. GoutPal Sites search – level 1 plus the forum, blog and work in progress
3. Gout Search – level 2 plus carefully selected quality gout information websites and pages
4. Full Internet search – everything, from many sources

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GoutPal.com 2009 RoadMap

Phase	Description	Status
Planning	The new features described above	Completed August, but you can always suggest more gout website improvements
Prepare Old Site	Change or disable features proprietary features that will not convert	August
Prepare New Site	Develop layout and categories. Prepare new navigation and explanatory pages to create a framework to accept old pages	August
Transfer Site	Copy all files to a new server in existing static format.	21st August
Convert Formats	Change old .html formats to new dynamic posts, or rewrite completely, and redirect.	September – October
Add new content	New articles and summary pages	September – forever