EvertSmith.com Launched

EvertSmith.com is a website for ground–breaking hip surgeon, speaker and educator, Evert Smith, who practices in the NHS and privately in Bristol and London.

He was the first Bristol hip surgeon to perform minimally invasive hip surgery—a technique that significantly accelerates patient recovery time and reduces discomfort.

Passion is not a word normally associated with surgeons. Hear Evert Smith talk about hip surgery and how it can change peoples’ lives though, and that’s what comes across. He's a man dedicated to his job in a way we can fully relate to and many might envy. Oftentimes, there is a perception that surgeons are elusive, distant and perhaps dismissive towards their patients. However, when Evert saw a former patient of his in a coffee shop, his first instinct was to go and chat to her. Again, not an attitude that many might automatically associate with orthopaedic surgeons. In a sector where the consultant is king and one that’s renowned for huge egos, he stands out. We still can’t decipher his e–mails (the modern equivalent of doctor’s handwriting) but as well as being a world–renowned surgeon he’s a great bloke, and that, if anything, is worthy of the highest praise we can offer.

We were commissioned to create a site for Evert that would speak to both patients and fellow professionals. The requirements of patients and their families are changing rapidly. People want more information about their surgeon, the treatment they will receive and they want to know it will be the best. This necessitates more detailed information being made available, which is often of a technical nature. Trying to balance that with a house style that is still legible for a non–medical audience is something we will continue to strive for, but hopefully we’ve made some progress in that direction.

Highlights

Personalising a Surgeon

One core objective was to ensure that Evert and his medical secretary, Sue, are as approachable on the Web as they are in real life. With our encouragement, Evert and Sue deliberately tried to stay away from overly formal, third–person language and tone in the site copy. We also deliberately included more informal pictures of Evert and tried to accurately reflect his personality as an educator, professional and consultant.

Nevertheless, the site is information–driven, containing information for patients, research and a personal flavour. The interface is easy to navigate yet still (hopefully) retains a scholarly air of exactness and accuracy that's so important in someone who operates on people. Therefore, there’s no attempt to create a brand, which may further separate the professional from the patient. Instead, we've tried to personalise Evert and enable patients to access detailed and often technical information in a useful way while they also get to know more about the author.

Never Mind Us, Hear from the Patients

Testimonials for Evert, with pictures where available, have been added to the content with the kind permission of the patients concerned. Thanks to them, visitors can hear from actual patients about their experiences. Having surgery is obviously a very private, often anxious and painful experience,therefore we can't thank the patients enough for taking the time to write a few words on Evert’s behalf.

The Orthopaedic Blog

Evert’s weblog used our in–house blog application to enable Evert to publish text and pictures on all kinds of topics, from research and technical data to musings on the conferences he speaks at—in fact, anything that takes his interest. As a former marine biologist and keen photographer, expect Evert to publish some interesting material to his blog over the next few months. Our blog application was modified to distribute blog posts to different areas of the site, allowing visitors to browse relevant information exactly when it is needed. It also contains options to add forthcoming events, bookmarks of interesting pages from around the Web and specific research papers.

Elastic Accessibility

The site is designed to respond to users’ own text size. Everything, including images, stretches and shrinks depending on what people set as their preferred font size. In addition, we ensured that the design not only exceeds the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 priority 2 checkpoints, but also uses the latest best practice in all areas to help people with a wide range of disabilities to access information on the site. We would encourage anyone who may encounter issues to contact Evert or Sue directly or myself, Jon Gibbins, via our contact page.

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