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Turn Newsletters into Educational Pages

Some infertility clinics mail newsletters to patients (and potential patients). Then later the clinic might add the newsletter to a newsletter section of the clinic's Web site. However, doing this creates problems and limits the usability of the information.  Rather, IHR recommends that the newsletter articles be turned into separate educational Web pages and placed in an educational, rather than a newsletter, section of the Web site. Doing this, has the following advantages:

1. You will not have to deal with newsletter date problems. If you are unable to send out a newsletter for a period of time, then it will look strange for a user to see big gaps in dates in your online newsletter section.  Worse, if your last newsletter on the site is dated four years ago.
    
2. You can combine all educational articles into one organized place on your site. If your Web site contains a section for newsletters and a separate section for educational pages, then you won't have a simple way of organizing the articles into separate topics.  For example, if you have an educational page about ICSI and a newsletter article about ICSI, it will be difficult to put those articles side by side for a user.
    
3. You can convert each newsletter article into a separate Web page, each of which can be used for your site promotion.  You don't have be concerned about keep the integrity of the newsletter together. Instead, you can think about using the newsletter as a source of making educational Web pages. Then you can add keywords for the search engines into each educational Web page.
    
4. You can update the educational pages whenever they need updating. If you keep the article as a newsletter, then later you may be hesitant to provide a needed update to the page, because you would be altering the integrity of the newsletter - "Issue number 17 said XYZ and we can't change the information in that issue, because that would not be truthful."

Some additional questions/comments to consider:

• You can still add a newsletter citation at the bottom of your educational Web pages - e.g., "this article is based on information from XYZ newsletter, issue number ___."
   
• Internet users simply want to find information. Do they really care that the information is from a particular newsletter issue?
   
• A newsletter is basically a way of bundling printed newsworthy articles.  However, the Web opens up new ways of providing information. For example, all articles written in the last three years about ICSI can be combined into one place on your site.