Tips

Tips on Using and Managing your Website

The FAQ and Help Screens give the formal information on how to configure your website. On this page you will find more informal general advice and tips.

You can send us your own tips for other users, and also send any questions or topics that you would like to see addressed here.

1. Domain Names
   
2. Branch Surgeries
   
3. Practising and Testing
   
4. Customising Homepages (and others)
   
5. Put a picture on your home page
   
6. Successful Design Schemes
   
7. Background Files
   
8. File Sharing
   
9. Backups
   
10. Mailing List
    
11. Add a Search Box
    
12. Use the GPUK.net Search Box!
    
13. More Tips
    

Register your Free Domain Name - Quick!

Get your .nhs.uk domain registered for your practice. Get it registered now before some other practice with a similar name gets it first. If they register www.yoursurgeryname.nhs.uk before you then there's nothing to be done other than to use your second choice name :-(

Registration is free to NHS General Practices, and all you have to do is to fill in a form, fax it off, and let us know the name that you have chosen. Or, if you prefer, send us a few details using the online form linked from your Admin page, and we shall liase with the NHSIA on your behalf.

See the Help Page on Domain Names for details.

It is easy and free of charge to transfer your .nhs.uk domain away from GPUK if you subsequently decide not stay with us.

Branch Surgeries

If your practice has branch surgeries you can set up your website to accommodate this.

• On the prescriptions page, set your collection options to give the patients the chance to indicate whether they wish to collect from your main surgery or from the branch.
  
  
• So that patients can select appointments for either place, use the staff details admin option to add all your doctors/nurses a second time.
  
  
  • (IMPORTANT, read the warning on that page, make sure that you spell the second instance of each name slightly differently e.g. include initials or abbreviations)
    
    
  Make the display names indicate where the appointments will be. e.g. if you have a Dr John Smith, you could amend the display name to "Dr Smith at Main Surgery", and make a second Dr Smith (use the name "Jon" or "John H" Smith) and set the display name to "Dr Smith at Branch".
  
  
• Whilst setting up names, set the second instance of each Dr to be not listed on the prescription or registration pages, or else each name will appear there twice in slightly different forms.
  
  

Practising and Testing

You may wish to test out a particular option or style, but hesitate to experiment on your live website. You are welcome to sign up for a second website which you will use only for test purposes. There will be no charge for this. Just go through the free signup and setup a website with the same practice details as your present site but with a slightly different account name e.g. put test or 2 on the end of it, and then use this for experimentation.

Experiment with the Editing and Customisation Tools

You don't need any technical skills to change the appearance and content of your webpages.

Try out the various onscreen utilities - they're simple.

Automated Backgrounds, Text, Colour Scheme, Logos, Images, etc

If you don't like your page style, or if you're feeling adventurous, change it!

NEW - use the style selection page (follow the link from your Admin page) to simply select a new style for your website.

Using the utilities linked from the Admin page you can easily change any or all of the following:

• Amend the display of your doctors and nurses names, perhaps especially relevant if you have registrars or assistants. NB if there is an error e.g. in the spelling of a name, son't just change it on the menubar, first go to the staff details admin page and correct it there.
  
  
• Choose whether or not to show links to the appointments and repeats pages
  
  
• Change the text on any of the pages.
  
  
  • Tip If you want to make a lot of changes, compose them offline first, then you can copy and paste your preferred text into the boxes on the homepage screen.
    
    
• You can add more links to the left menubar.
  
  
  • Add the address of your link e.g. www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk or if the page is one that you have created: www.yourpractice.nhs.uk/newpage/
    
    
  • Enter the description that you want to show for the link.
    
    
  • You can add menubar links so that they appear on every page, or only on specific pages. Using the latter option you can create subsections of your website. e.g. you could add an Audits link to the main menubar, but only on your Audit index page do you link all the actual audits (To link to all of them on the main menu listing would clutter it).
    
    
• Choose a different background. If you want more choice then upload some background files of your own (they must be in jpg format).
  
  
• Choose a picture or logo for the top left of your homepage. If you have a digital camera or a scanned photo of your surgery you could upload that and use that in this position (must be in gif format) or you could use an NHS logo.
  
  
• Choose a stylesheet, which will set the font face and colour for your pages.
  
  
  • Stylesheets can adjust a lot more than just font face and colour
    
    
  • If you want to download the stylesheets you can then edit them and upload them back again
    
    
  • You can set the font size, table designs, change the emphasis of highlighted elements and headers, change the colour and underlining of hyperlinks, and so on.
    
    
  • If you get a good result and you want to share it with others, upload it to the shared files area.
    
    
• Changes take effect immediately. Your patients will be able to see the results straight away. Don't let your staff tinker about and make a foolish website! This is why it is a good idea to compose text changes and check for errors first, and only then go to the editing screen and paste in the prepared and checked text.
  
  
• Changes to the stylesheet and the background all affect the other pages (appointments, prescriptions, etc) as well as the homepage. But if you want to change the text and other details for those pages then use their own configuration screens.
  
  

Put a Picture on your Home Page

Perhaps you'd like to include a photo of your surgery on your home page, or a group photo of the practice staff.

1. Upload your picture, using the File Upload utility, to your "images" directory.
   
   
2. Using the Home Page Detailed Customisation screen, edit the first paragraph of your homepage, which initially simply says, "Welcome to our website", and replace that with the following HTML code (do not omit the dot before /images):
   
   
   • <center><img src = "./images/picturename.jpg"></center>
     
     
3. Ideally you would also indicate the dimensions of the image in pixels, but this is not compulsory:
   
   
   • <center><img src = "./images/picturename.jpg" height = "200" width = "376" ></center>
     
     

The picture can be in any of the web usable formats, i.e. jpg, gif, png, and may be placed in a different directory if you prefer.

Successful Design Schemes

If you want more default stylesheets with different colours and styles let us know and we'll design more and make them available to you. Possibilities include more fonts (but remember that your patients may not have many different fonts installed), different text colours, different colours for text and headings and highlights, fancy stand out and bevelled table designs for the appointments and prescription pages (but your patients' web browsers may show them differently to how they appear to you).

Start off simply. Use black text and experiment with different backgrounds. Or use a white background (NHS recommended) by selecting the plain_white.jpg background file, and try out different colours of text.

Personalise your website by scanning a picture of your practice or it's logo and uploading that in gif format to use as your top left logo.

Keep an eye on the gpuk Demo accounts e.g.

• www.gpuk.net/demo
• www.gpuk.net/demo1
• www.gpuk.net/demo2
• www.gpuk.net/demo3
• www.gpuk.net/demo4

We'll put demonstrations there of different possibilities for you.

There are NHS guidelines on Website styles and colour schemes (quite restrictive) at an NHSnet site: http://nww.doh.nhsweb.nhs.uk/commsnet/websites.htm

Background Files

The Background selection link on the Admin page shows you some backgrounds from which you can make a selection. We have a much larger selection of backgrounds available, including some of the more garish ones!

You can download by ftp from ftp://ftp.gpuk.net/backgrounds/ but that way you do not get a preview of the files.

Or you can browse all the files available on this page but be warned that it will take a few minutes to download as it includes many images (background samples).

File Sharing

If you want to share a successful style sheet redesign or background image or suchlike with other users, or if you want to see what others have made available, use our file sharing area.

Upload the files that you want to share into our anonymous ftp server ftp.gpuk.net (login name is ftp, password is your email address). We'll move them to a publicly available download area. Please also upload a text file giving the description of the file that you have uploaded together with your name and email address (or you could email details of your file to uploads@gpuk.net). Ensure that any files that you upload are free from copyright if you are not the copyright holder.

To browse or download a file go to the download area at ftp://ftp.gpuk.net/ .

Backups

A boring topic, but...

Do be sure to keep backups of any files that you upload to your GPUK.net website. They could be lost by several means*, and you will kick yourself if you have put a lot of work into editing a text or graphic file only to lose it.

Keep a couple of backup copies, perhaps one on your home PC and one on your server at the practice (which hopefully is regularly backed up...).

* You might overwrite them when uploading newer versions, and then realise that the new version is not as good as you hoped. System faults may occur and lose your files. And so on. Back up now.

Mailing List

Subscribe to the GPUK-users mailing list by going to:

www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/gpuk-users

You can use this to discuss with other users how they are using the system and to give and receive advice.

Maybe you don't know what a mailing list is? If you send an email to the list email address it is automatically copied to all the other people subscribed to the list (and you will also receive a copy of your own email since you are also a subscriber to the list).

Anyone of those people reading your email may have something to say in response - they send their email to the same mailing list address and their email is copied in the same way to all users. Anyone else can butt in and have their say, and so in this way a group discussion is enabled.

You can be a member of the list and not join in. You just read what everyone else is saying and learn from it whatever you may, and only join in if you feel that you have something to add.

In fact on most mailing lists many people never join in - they still find it useful since they can pick up tips by seeing how other peoples questions are answered.

GPUK.net staff are also members of the list, so we can see what types of issues are causing difficulties, hopefully join in the discussion with some answers, and also take away for further develpment any useful ideas that arise.

Add a Search Box to your Website

Automated Pages users should follow these instructions.

Customised Website users should follow these instructions.

Use the GPUK.net Search Box!

GPUK.net has its own search box on the left menubar of every help page. Use it to locate information on how to achieve your website tasks.

More Tips

We'll add more tips here soon.