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This week, we worked on yet another small improvement that most users won't notice: we improved the profile claim process. As background, we've been getting reports of providers trying to claim their profiles while not being near the phone number that they're using to perform the claim. It's not hard to imagine a busy provider wanting to do this from home, but only having his or her office numbers listed on the profile. In this scenario, one can imagine the provider going ahead to start the process rather than risk forgetting to claim the profile at a later time. The underlying assumption would be that our system would leave a message on the office answering service.

Unfortunately, our previous call script would not wait for the answering service message to finish, and as a result, the claim code would often not get recorded. In response to some inquiries, we have modified the call script to try to detect the situation when an answering service might pick up and wait for a pause before continuing with the script.

If you have other ideas of what needs to be fixed, please let us know.

We're updating our user interface today. These aren't major, thematic changes - such as when the Twix logo went from serif to sans serif letters (okay, maybe that wasn't major, but it was shock to me as a kid). Instead, I've been working on cleaning up the style that already exists. This basically means two things.

First, frames should now be properly aligned and properly sized. For example, the navigation bar at the top of the search results page will stretch as far as the map stretches. Thus, there'll be a single edge defining the right side of the page. And if you resize the page, this edge will be maintained.

Second, the style should be more consistent. For instance, I tried to unify the search results page by making all the headers and borders the same color. This might run the risk of being too monochromatic, but I think the red accent helps prevent that. I also made sure that this header/border color was the same from the search results page to the user profile pages.

I hope you enjoy these small touches. If you have other feedback on how to present a better user experience, please let us know.

As we iterate on our business model, we're looking for help to sell online advertising space. Know people who might be interested? If so, tell them to

apply here.

We think it'd be a great opportunity for the successful candidate to grow with the business.

When we launched DocSpot publicly, we reserved some space for advertising. Since advertising revenue was always supposed part of the long-term business plan, we didn't want consumers to be surprised when we started to rely on it. However, since the traffic started out small and we had a lot of other things to work on, we didn't spend much time figuring out how to maximize revenue -- we just participated in the advertising network that is probably the easiest one to use. Over the last year, our traffic has grown substantially enough that we're starting to give this formerly neglected area of business some more attention.

If you know of good advertising networks or are familiar with the direct sales model for advertising, we'd like to hear from you. We're still early in our process of figuring out what path to take, but we'd like to explore some options.

We're thinking of changing our logo. That's rather unfortunate because we actually like our current logo. It turns out that the caduceus (currently used in the logo) is actually a symbol for commerce, and not originally meant for medicine (see Wikipedia for more information, especially the section on "Contemporary views"). What's interesting is that the majority of hospitals surveyed used the caduceus rather than the rod of Asclepius. This is likely in part because the caduceus seems more aesthetically pleasing than the rod.

Another issue with the current logo is that it looks very similar to some other logos (for example, take a look at certain lines of Crest toothpaste or some varieties of Head-and-Shoulders shampoo). So, if we do change our logo, we'd like something more distinctive.

Figuring out a logo is one of those tasks that take far longer than it seems like it should. If you have any ideas of what our new logo should be, please let us know.