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If you read the text below you will see why the text size is fairly large on our Ekbom/Restless legs site and we make a few other points - are they still valid points - even when that original text was written it was easy to change the size of the text and we ignored that fact as we thought most people would not vary the size of their text. Now, in many browsers it is easy to change the size of text with the magnifying glass or size of text controls, so do we need to change? Do you use the magnifying glass or any other method to change the size of text?
A few years ago we reorganised this web site - brought it up to date and provided the sections with a look or two - the printer friendly pages were all white back ground - two different yellows were used as background and the old legs background from a brochure we used was still used on some pages. This was on a section basis and the common theme was the green backed ESG logo. It will be soon time to update the site.
So in order to refurbish this site we need to know your views:
When you go to find a site? How do you do it - for instance do you use favourites or bookmarks or do you use a search engine.
( I ask this question because I find myself increasingly using the search tools on an every day basis. I have added Google Search bar to IE7 but there are plenty of others about. (Yahoo (and its tool bar) and MSN for instance and it is easy to choose one as a standard or even set it as a home page. So favourites do not get used quite as much these days here but Google tool bar does get used a lot.
If you were redesigning the website what would you want to see in this area
One of the blessings of my task is the name of our condition - Ekbom Syndrome Support Group - with a name like that it is not all that hard to get to the search engines lists and top of them as well for that matter. But if it were UK Restless Legs support group the search returns would be a nightmare - restless - support - legs - UK - all would do some sort of trick on the search engines but it would be hard to even be on the first page.
What do you think? Stick with the name?
Do you ever visit the site of RLS:UK ?
And what about content - if you find us you want to know about the condition and the fixes - is that right and do we tell the story now you wanted to hear?
And then should we be more professional? Today's standards are so different from those when we started out. The top 10 ways ofattracting the attention of the search engines sypder bots do change - we rate reasonably highly but, for instance, we use a site map for the bots to crawl all over and we use keywords in the welcome page but not elsewhere like others do and we do not use cookies is that a record of some sort - or make people register or use passwords - is that off putting to today's site visitors - do they all expect to register? - and we do not have a FAQ or a blog or a bulletin board.
Do
you feel assured when you see this sign like this 
a standard to which web sites can be built so that
every browser built to that standard will display your site equally well as the other browsers designed to the same set of rules. Or should we just accommodate the leading browsers and check the others?
My over riding thought is that many sites are so complicated that you cannot find the information you want - have we got to that stage yet? If so, do we need a search facility - but then you have to know what you want to search for; perhaps an alphabetical index would be better.
Have you any samples of sites that are clear and attractive and yet have got all the information you need easily to hand?
Yes I know it takes a long time to think and then compose a reply to series of questions like this but please tell me what you think.
Short break now for a bit of fun - a cartoon from wrongdiagnosis.com at the bottom of their page there is a link to the next cartoon - come back here using the back button in your browser.
The same site's Ekbom Syndrome home page is here. Don't forget to come back here. Use the browser back button.
How would you feel if we displayed all those adverts? I have kept away from them so far as I feel it is playing occasionally into the charlatan's or snake oil salesman's hands. The commercial camp is always out to relieve us of our money, why not . But perhaps that is very insular and old fashioned. - do we go with the flow or stay individual. If we were to stay individual then how do we arrange to take notice of what is said and thought that we need to take notice of.
Thank you for reading these outpourings.
Webmaster.
email
the webmaster with your thoughts
This text is the text that was originally on this page:
Please help us to improve this site.
Please tell us (briefly) how you found this site. (That way we can tailor where pointers to the site occur).
Please tell us if it met your needs. If it didn't, tell us why not. What did you not find? (After all the whole point of the site is to meet the needs of visitors and perhaps we have not anticipated yours).
Please tell us what other features you would like to find here. (We have been told that the site does not have the style of some of the latest sites. That is fine by us. We want to be distinctive but we are not selling anything).
We have been told that it would be a good idea to run a bulletin board and we hope the Topica forum meets this need.
You have told us that you wish to print out some of the information to take with you when you go to see your doctor. Many of the pages have a printer friendly version - one that has no background and very few graphic items. These have been designed to print from Internet Explorer (Version 6 or 7 ). For this to work best your computer should be set to work at a display of 1028 x 628 pixels (start/control panel/display/settings tab/ screen resolution area).
On some systems, on our printer friendly Newsletters archive page for instance, it might take up to 36 pages of normal print set up to accommodate all our text. Consider reading the text on the screen, or highlighting and copying and pasting into your word processor the text that you need. Print preview is advised before printing from your browser and, using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 for instance, this is a sensible way of selecting the page numbers you wish to print. Make full use of "shrink to fit page" and "magnification".
The size of font used has been selected to aid those, perhaps of older than average age, who might have difficulty reading the small size of font often used in today's web sites. If you are using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 there is a facility under the menu heading "view" to choose a different size of font. Other browsers have similar facilities.
This web site has been tested and compiled using Internet Explorer 7 at the 1028 x 628 resolution mentioned above but tested on Safari, Netscape and Firefox browsers at some time. If there is an untoward reaction between our pages and the browser you are using please let us know and we will try and improve things for other users.
