New Website - the start of great things
5 min read
Dr Suresh Khirwadkar
Thank you to all my patients and anyone else that is looking at (and hopefully enjoying) my new website.
I finally had the time to do it! It's been many months in the making, probably over a year, but I finally got some time to just sit down and get it done.
Not many know but coding is a little hobby of mine. I love learning new things, and coding is definitely something new for me.
What is coding? And what is this site made of?
Coding goes by many different names and means different things to different people, but when I say coding I'm referring to website creation. What you see here is what is called the 'front end' - the bits you see. The 'back end' is, well, the bits you don't see. Thankfully this site doesn't really require any complicated databases or back end, so that was fairly simple to do.
For anyone that's interested, it's coded in NextJS - a REACT framework designed to be blisteringly fast. It utilises both Static Site Generation (SSG) and Incremental Server Rendering (ISR) to deliver extremely quick page load speeds. Nothing is worse than waiting 20 seconds for a webpage to load.
I've also made it so that it is what we call a progressive web app - PWA. It's actually downloadable to your phone or computer so you can load it even quicker and view most of it offline.
Blog
My old site had my blog on it, but well, frankly I hadn't updated it in a while as I just didn't have the time, and those articles are looking a little tired now anyway, so I've decided to just start from scratch again. I'll be putting out the occasional blog post on here, and soon will have an RSS feed going for them, so stay tuned if you want to read those.
I've still some more work to do on this site, but for now it's production ready - or you wouldn't be seeing it.
Videos
I've put a page that links to some of my YouTube playlists - it actually scrapes the YouTube API so it will populate with new videos on my playlists there, so please do watch those and subscribe to my channel. Lots more videos coming soon, especially on weight loss and lifestyle medicine that I know many of my patients are really liking at the moment.
How fast is my new site?
Well you can see for yourself, it's blistering fast to load pages. That's why I did all the coding myself, I really didn't want lots of plugins or nonsense slowing it down for you guys. But here's a few pics of my old site and new site:
compared to now
You can see the difference in those scores, but you can definitely feel the difference browsing around. That's why I implemented things like ISR on the Videos page - to not slow it down like SSR would! (sorry nerd talk)
To do list
I still have quite a few things to do to the site, and I'm sure I'll think of more as time goes on, but at the moment my plans for the site are:
- Create the RSS feed for the blog
- Add more useful files to the files section
- Fix the image sizes for the icons on the back end to get the site loading even quicker
- Implement 2 way chat through the app
- Add video calling direct in the app
- Add directly fillable forms for questionnaires / wellness scores with ability to email or print directly
My future plans
I've been busy coding this site for the last few weeks, it's been pretty intensive learning it all from scratch. Hopefully you all agree it's looking and feeling pretty great, and hopefully my more IT savvy patients don't laugh at it! However, it's taken a lot of time and I've put myself a bit behind on my studying.
Lifestyle Medicine
As some of my patients know I'm currently studying torwards my Board Certification in Lifestyle Medicine. It's extremely intensive. I've still got to write up my case study, finish my online course and do over 200 more hours of CPD. Then I have to sit the 4 hour exam. I'm confident, but the website to do list might take a little longer than planned.
Videos
You all know I like to create my own videos on my YouTube channel. Well that's taken a real backfoot for the last few months, I've been super busy outside of work hours to do anything on it. But, I plan to restart.
I'm moving house soon, so once I'm in my new place I will hopefully start filming again to get more videos out.
Blog
I'll be trying to do a new article every month at least, so keep tuned for those.
Private Billing
As some of you know, I'm changing to private billing in the new Financial year. Hopefully you all know and understand the reasons by now, but I will be doing a follow up blog post soon about it that patients can read if they have questions as to why I'm making the change. If you want a super succint reason it's this:
Fewer patients, more time to care
If you haven't seen Jerry Maguire, well you may not get that reference (but please go watch the film it's great), but I really do feel that as doctors we need to spend more time with our patients. Privately billing enables me to do so.