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PurpleSites

NHS Compliant Websites


PurpleSites is our website service available to all health and care organisations. Whether you need a simple templated site or a fully bespoke website solution then we can help you.

We provide an extensive range of features in our website solutions to help you to help your service users.

You can review the range of details below:

NHS Compliant Websites

Navigate your patients online at any time day or night. PurpleSites can be configured to signpost patients to the best service to meet patients' current needs, having first been shown patient self help information sourced from NHS.UK

You can quickly and easily configure the service to signpost patients to any local service. Uniquely you can also link directly to an organisation’s online consultation service, and if that service supports it, to condition specific questionnaires. This encourages patients to continue their journey online as far as possible and then, if they still need to contact a service, to initiate their enquiry with the service digitally.

Our search function will find any text on the site matching your search criteria and allows you to add keywords and phrases to pages. Using keywords can be helpful as occasionally your page may not contain the word which people are searching for or it might be helpful when we don’t quite get the spelling right (after all how many people, that do not work in healthcare, do you know who can spell diarrhoea correctly without using spell check!

People can also use your custom menus to find what they want as well as you being able to have custom links on your pages to help fastrack patients to specific information that they might access all the time, or seasonally. You might add a link to an appointment page which is always displayed on your home page, or you might add a link to your flu page during the winter months and change that to a hayfever page in the summer.

We provide a Content Cascading function so that content created, as an example, at a PCN level could also be cascaded down to any and all connected portal sites (e.g. GP Practices).

This means you have full control over what is created and delivered to the sites. If, at the local level, they do not have edit permissions, then the integrity of the content is maintained. Equally, if local permissions are enabled, then the content can be edited and localised.

You can add alerts for key messages you want visitors to be aware of when they visit your site. These will appear at the top of the home page. You can even set a date and time to control the appearance of alerts to set them in advance and then disappear automatically at the time you set.

Our websites allow you to link to any EPR so visitors can order repeat prescriptions or book, change, or cancel an appointment.

You can add Google Translate to your website if you need a quick and easy way to provide a translated website. For those surgeries located in Wales or Scotland, and for those surgeries located in areas with a high proportion of patients whose first language isn’t English, our sites can be configured to display alternative language pages should you want to guarantee an accurate translation.

When patients visit your website for a health concern the information they see about the condition is sourced directly from the NHS and presented directly onto your website. In addition, with PurpleSites you can easily add and manage your own localised content which can direct patients to local services and solutions. It’s the perfect blend of nationally approved content with your local knowledge to help your patients help themselves. All of our PurpleSites plans have NHS syndicated self help information built in.

Our local service directory allows people to find local services while staying on your website, rather than being taken to NHS.UK. This makes it easier for the web user as they do not have to find their way back to your site and can easily move on to their next task.

Our service directory allows you to add any service you want. It’s not restricted to healthcare services, you can add care services, local VCSE services (including those that aren’t directly health or care related, such as Citizens Advice Bureau), as well as services that might be used for social prescribing (e.g. gyms).

Our GP and PCN websites incorporate a special edition of PurpleForms, our purpose built Forms engine, which has been designed from the start to process special category data in line with GDPR and your record keeping policy. This special edition includes the essential forms needed by GPs and PCNs such as new patient registration and new patient medical.

Other services can use the PurpleForms free plan or purchase one of the other PurpleForms plans. PurpleForms has a suite of standard forms covering a range of use cases including patient and staff surveys, admin enquiries and medical enquiries/referrals.

Learn more about PurpleForms here.

Our websites have been carefully designed to meet the needs of your visitors, being responsive, accessible, and using NHS styling to reinforce the NHS brand which is trusted by the UK population. If you want to change the styling of your website (e.g. community pharmacies and care homes) we can help you do this.

Approve content before it’s published to your website. Setup content creators and approvers to make sure content is correct before visitors to your site see it.

We have developed a Workflow module so that content editors can effectively own and manage designated sections of their website. Content, once entered, is then submitted to a Content Approver who can check, accept or reject, in which case comments can be added and the section returned to the editors for further review. This includes a full WYSIWYG view for the editor and approver allowing you to check what changes look like as well as checking the content, before they are deployed.

Risks always exist and human error is the biggest culprit so training is essential. In any event, our content management system, and the WorkFlow, has a rollback function to revert to up to 5 previous versions of content.

Not everyone has a company intranet or a managed server for document storage but our web solutions allow you to create a space for staff and the PPG to access documents and information. You can also create different access levels.

As our sites are developed for mobile first there are no pop-ups or overlays used as these can be difficult to use on mobile devices, and accessibility tools, such as screen readers, can find them difficult to interpret. Our design is fully responsive so whether you use it on a mobile, tablet or desktop it will look great. This is all built into the design so your content editors don’t have to think about it when they are adding content.

Our development team is trained to be aware of accessibility requirements and when we create and update our platform we use accessibility tools to check their compliance before they are released.

Our team has worked hard to make sure that the default design, layout, and components used on our platform make it as simple as possible for organisations to maintain AA level by not including content which isn’t compliant with this standard.

You can keep your current website address or we can provide a new one. If you have a NHS.UK address that’s fine, you can keep that too.

Our sites include a News and Blog module allowing you to update your site visitors with the latest news from your surgery.

Our News function allows you to add and categorise news and cascade news to other sites. This way you can have a central communications team creating articles and easily distributing them to the relevant audiences.

The News module also allows you to add events so you could use this to advertise training courses. It also has a registration feature so people can register to attend events, and you can limit the number of people able to attend an event so that the registration function is disabled when the limit is reached.

If you want to create a blog on your website(s) the News module allows this. Create your blog articles in the same way you do your news articles and distribute them using a separate category. It’s that simple.

The News module also includes access control so you can control who can do what and at what level, for example, you might have one person who can create and approve content at the PCN and someone else who can only create content at the practice.

We pride ourselves on providing a professional and reliable service. We monitor our web based services 24/7 so if there are any issues we can fix them promptly and your website is backed up daily so we can fully reinstate the site in the event of a major catastrophy. You can contact us by phone, email or online if you have any issues using your website.

We want you to feel confident adding new content to your website so that you can keep your service users informed and up to date. To help you with this we’ll provide two hours of training every year and give you access to our training videos, included in the cost of your PurpleSite. We can also provide additional training at a reasonable hourly rate should you require it.

All of our websites are hosted in the UK and split across 2 secure data centres. We have worked with the same hosting provider for more than 12 years forming a unique relationship with them and their technical team. We now have 12 dedicated virtual web-servers that are backed up every 24 hours with 14 day backup retention, enabling us to fully restore a website either partially, or entirely, should it be required. We have a fully managed service arrangement providing us with 24/7/365 support. All our websites include a SSL certificate.

Understanding how users are interacting with a website is key to ensuring that information is suitably relevant, easily located, and correctly rendering across devices. Google Analytics plays a key role in collecting and collating the data around these user behaviours alongside helpful demographic information such as the location and age range of website users.

Unless expressly requested not to, at the point of going live, all websites and portals will be submitted to Google Analytics and access can be granted to the organisation to allow analytics to be continually monitored.

Our sites will always comply with the latest guidance from the NHS and legislation to give you the peace of mind that your website is compliant.

Adding new content and changing existing content is quick and easy. Our content management system is used to develop hundreds of thousands of websites across the world.

From the start our websites have followed NHS Design Guidelines and incorporated NHS Design Components.

Migrating from your existing website provider is quick and easy.  We offer a fixed price service to do this or you can do it yourself.