I AM A DC IN CONNECTICUT.  YOUR WEBSITE IS ONE OF BEST I'VE SEEN.

IF YOU WOULDN'T MIND, CAN YOU TELL ME WHO YOU GOT IT THROUGH AND HOW
EFFECTIVE IT'S BEEN?  HOW MUCH DOES IT COST TO MAINTAIN AND DOES THE COMPANY
YOU USED FOR SERVICE COVER THE WHOLE COUNTRY?

THANKS.

Reply:

Dear Dr. Jeff,
Thank for your comments and compliments.  To answer your questions, I am cutting, pasting, and updating answers to questions someone asked previously this year that was interested in developing a chiropractic website.  Therefore, it may answer a little more than you asked.

We use our web site to the best potential we know of:
patient list emails, testimonials to drive our patients and their friends to the site, register with all search engines, etc..

To answer your questions:
The site has been up one year.

The hit counter reads for the month of June 1999:  144 front page hits, 576 site hits

My site, and hence, its traffic is growing.  In September so far, 319 front-page hits, 1160 site hits.

I have had about 15 health related questions or philosophy challenges by way of e-mail thus far.

Zero new patients have been generated from the web site.  (though one patient from the internet yellow pages that I know of)

My cost of the site is:
$20.00 per month AT&T unlimited net access includes 30 megs of space.
$35.00/year domain name.
$25.00/year Namesecure (to transfer domain name to my AT&T space)
The site has not generated income, but it may in the future.  If not, I still enjoy creating the web pages!

A web site is zero importance in the chiropractic profession.  Word of mouth will spread much faster than any search engine...If there is love and compassion for the patients.  If the site serves the public information at all, then it serves more than patient generation (which is zero).  And it has served information by way of e-mail.  I do, however, feel that most of those hits to my site are chiropractors, chiropractic students, or those that do not believe chiropractic principles.  I get many hits referred from http://chiroweb.com, a pro chiropractic site.  I get several hits from Xxxxxxxxx, a chiropractic "hate" site.  I believe few hits are from potential patients.

Also, the site is accessible from any country with a modem where there is internet access.  If you have questions for AT&T, call 800 400 1447.  I had AOL but did not like the service.  I found frequent busy signals, they never reimbursed me for illegal charges made to my account, and it was very difficult to post internet pages to the comparatively small web space (I think they only gave me 2 megs).

I did come to realize that the number one thing people use the internet for is health related stuff.  I do not believe they are looking for chiropractic stuff, though.  I believe they get a diagnosis from a doctor and type the dis-ease name in the search engine box.  This means, if you want to generate traffic from search engines, your site should contain information about various diseases.  As an example, the most traffic generating page I have is erbspalsy.html .  It is also the most recent page I have written - hardly available yet by way of search engine.

I hope this information helps.

Yours in Health,
Michael Haley, D.C.