Behind the Scenes:
The Making of ajc.com's Nursing Home Guide

Editor's note: As part of a recent Atlanta-Journal Constitution series on nursing homes, "The Bottom Line of Caring," the newspaper's Web site built and published a searchable nursing home guide that let users research specific homes in detail, including checking what each nursing home in Georgia spends on its patients and how staffing levels at homes compare. CyberJournalist.net asked Adrian Holovaty, ajc.com's assistant database editor, to describe how and why the Nursing Home Guide was built.

By Adrian Holovaty

The ajc.com Nursing Home Guide was the result of a year of research and months of Web production.

Editors had the Web in mind from day one. It was decided that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution would provide a Web resource for hard-to-find, often confusing, information about every nursing home in Georgia. It would accompany an investigative series in the print edition. Comprehensive and "sticky," this kind of in-depth resource was made for the Web.

Carrie Teegardin, AJC special projects reporter, began gathering nursing home data a year ago. Some data was easy to get -- such as inspection results, which are online at medicare.gov in convenient Microsoft Access format. Other data wasn't as simple: Financial information was available only in paper form, and Carrie had to type all of it into her database. It took months to compile and clean everything.

I got involved toward the end of the data collection process. Carrie met with me to explain what she'd been doing, and she showed me which pieces of information about each home she and her editor had decided to present on each home's detail page.

She had obtained much more data than what we ended up using. Instead of throwing it all online, they'd chosen the most important pieces. I think it's extra difficult to make such judgments with limitless space restrictions; you've got to think about what's really important.

With the important pieces in mind, I designed a sample detail page. Over the next week or so, we tossed it back and forth, shaping it to our liking. Somewhere in there, I thought it would be a good idea to present the "daily spending breakdown" information graphically, so I made a rudimentary HTML table with bar charts, using stretched one-pixel images as the bars so they'd load quickly. We both liked the graphical look, and I eventually made bar charts for all the numeric information, along with red "severity" bars for the inspection results. As a result, readers can grasp this information easily and quickly.

Shortly after the basic outline of the detail pages was settled, we decided which factors to use to rank nursing homes -- should we let users rank by number of inspection deficiencies? Average nursing hours? Again, we could have feasibly ranked by every piece of data, but we avoided doing things simply because we could. (For instance, it'd be meaningless to rank all nursing homes in Georgia by number of residents who need assistance in eating.)

Also at this point, we brainstormed the ways people might want to search this information. Unfortunately we're not able to do server-side scripting at ajc.com, so we weren't able to support text searches, but we decided on one main search page with several drop-down boxes -- one for each search type.

Once we had the index, ranking and detail pages designed, I brainstormed every way these pages could link to each other. I wanted an absolute avalanche of choices -- much like Amazon.com's "If you like this book, also try..." technique. From this emerged the "Find other homes in [this part of the state] or [this county] or [this city]" links. Then I added deep links to appropriate rankings pages in appropriate places. And I linked chain names to a list of other homes in that chain, etc, etc, etc.

Carrie wrote explanatory blurbs about almost every piece of data on the detail pages, and I was able to add "Find out what ______ means" everywhere. I decided to say, for example, "Find out what operating margin means" rather than link the operating margin itself to an explainer blurb because the former is much more user-friendly. I knew many people who would use this site (such as senior citizens) might not be traditional Web users, so I took extra care in making links obvious and writing descriptive text in plain English.

After adding a few more bells and whistles, like a locator map for each county in Georgia and a style-sheet switcher that "turns off" the graphical bars, I was ready to produce the pages. Again, since we can't do server-side scripting at ajc.com, we couldn't make it a dynamic site. So I ended up writing a handful of computer programs that created a static HTML file for every possible search combination -- around 3,200 files total.

We knew this was sensitive data, so we let nursing homes preview the site as a chance for them to point out any inaccuracies. I put the pages on a password-protected site, and Carrie e-mailed her contacts in the nursing home industry with the URL and password.

A few nursing homes submitted change requests, and we made those changes. After our lawyers took a final look at it, we launched the site.

Response has been outstanding. Many readers -- including several from the over-70 crowd -- have sent letters thanking us for the Web database and for Carrie's series of articles. We've also heard from advocate types that the site might help shape public policy.

A final thought: We've received several e-mails from people out of state who said they wished their local newspapers would make a similar feature. There's definitely a need -- and demand -- for this kind of journalism, and I encourage other sites to do it themselves.

Adrian Holovaty is assistant database editor and product developer at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Web site, ajc.com. A recent Missouri School of Journalism graduate, he's 21 and publishes a Weblog on design and usability of news Web sites at Holovaty.com.