Wednesday, July 14th, MedlinePlus will look different. They have redesigned the site, and created a new look, logo, color schemes, features and enhancements. The National Library of Medicine has a preview for you to look at and to read about the changes.
Some of the new features will be:
Different color pages for Spanish and English pages.
Simplified navigation to Health Topics, Drugs & Supplements, and Videos & Cool Tools.
Spotlight on popular features such as the Medical Dictionary, Popular Searches, and useful NIH databases.
Quick links to the mobile version and email updates, RSS, and Twitter. (Hmm shouldn’t they also be thinking about a Facebook? linking icon too?).
They will have a share button to post a Health Topic Page(s) to your social network of choice.
Redesign of the Drugs and Supplements Page to make it easier to choose between durgs and supplements.
It is hard to review the new site since all we can see are images of the redesign, we can’t get into the preview site and actually “test drive it.” I like their ideas and a lot of the things behind their update but the proof will be in the pudding on July 14th. One thing I did notice that I am concerned about is their link to their mobile site is at the bottom of their full Internet site. I hope they have servers that recognize somebody is accessing their site from a mobile device and it automatically sends the device to the mobile friendly site. If they don’t, mobile users will be quickly annoyed with scrolling to the bottom of the full site to get to the mobile version.