Health portal
XO Health Portal
The concept of the XO Health Portal is to build a content bundle using (relatively) simple HTML documents containing high-quality basic health information. These "leaf" topic pages are to be linked from a series of index pages. The design (and the initial starting content is going to be modelled on the MedLinePlus Health Topics portal from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) which is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Step 1
Identifying the content source
add some text
Step 2
Downloading raw materials
Step 3
Analyzing structure of MedLinePlus site and anatomy of an individual Health Topic page.
create dissection / analysis page
Step 4
Re-factoring the structure to be better suited for internationalization and localization.
layout design ideas
Step 5
After mechanics of new structure design and conversion of existing materials is worked out, a review of suitablility of individual topic pages can be performed. One advantage of waiting until after an initial version ofthe XO Health Portal is produced is to model the local modification of this content bundle and develop documentation of how to perform modification and upkeep on such a bundle.
These parts need to be worked in / reorganized to more clearly illustrate content workflow concepts involved
Content quality review This material is developed by the National Library of Medicine.
Content readability review use SMOG or other reading level tools
It may also be useful to reproduce the "List of All Health Topics" page and possibly the alphabetical sub-section linking to that page, but it is not clear how to do this easily when alphavetical ordering will change with translation into new languages.
Design Considerations
1) The topic areas listed here are taken directly from the MedLinePlus page and will require some modification to reflect the different prioritization of certain health topics between U.S. health priorities and a less-developed nation's health priorities. For example, "Transplantation and Donation" may not merit linclusion at Level1 where a topic such as Clean Water and Sanitation should probasbly have it's own listing at Level1 in many OLPC target countries, distinct from the "Poisoning, Toxicology, Environmental Health" index page.
This bundle will be designed for use use in the absence of an active internet connection, and so a variety of modifications will be required to allow smooth navigation while retaining teh capability of using this content bundle's pages as a launching point for further exploration of health topics via the WWW. One idea is to include an "exit" page, that can be locally modified with links to suitable health resources (e.g. local Ministry of Health, PAHO, WHO, etc.).
Dynamic HTML-like methods to achieve equivalent of ASP.NET 2.0 "master page" function. Possibly using xulrunner or XSL/XSLT. CSS will only get so far.