Digg It - Business

Today we want to talk about your website. Most, but not all, direct marketers sell from their websites. If you are one of the few who don’t, I think you still should have a website so people can communicate with you easily a

According to USFDA, a combination product is one composed of any combination of a drug and device; biological product and device; drug and biological product

nd to establish a presence – you as a brand.

(There are a few people out there who make a very good living in direct marketing without a website, but these are the exceptions. If you model your business after these folks, y

; or drug, device, and biological product and fixed dose combination would include two or more combinations of drug.

Examples of combination products may in

ou may ignore this article.)

Your website
With apologies in advance, we are going to have to get just a bit technical to discuss your website. I promise you it won’t be too scary.

Your website, your w

lude drug-coated devices, drugs packaged with delivery devices in medical kits, and drugs and devices packaged separately but intended to be used together.

b pages are located on a bit of hardware called a ‘server’, and this server is operated – managed - by some people we call a ‘host’. There are many hosts around you may choose from (we shall talk about this in more detail in

here is enormous increase in the number of combination products entering the market in the recent years. Combination products have proven advantages but fixe

Article Sixteen).

Think of it this way: If you like to write, you spend a great deal of time in front of your PC writing whatever it is you write using Microsoft Word. Word is application software that sits on your compute

d dose combinations are still in the process of convincing regulatory authority on their advantages over the single ingredient formulations.

Combination pro

and is available whenever you click on its icon and open it to use.

After you have written something, you save it as a file to your hard drive. You can then open it anytime you want either to edit it or simply read it usin

ucts have become life saving products for the pharmaceutical companies who doesn’t have many innovative molecules in their product pipeline and have been inc

g Microsoft Word as your application software.

Think of a server as a hard drive that sits in a building anywhere in the world, and is connected to your PC by your telephone line – your Internet connection. Then think of al

easingly used in the product life cycle management. Even the companies having product patents are trying to extend their product life cycle through the combi

l the servers in the world as being connected to each other, again by telephone lines. Your web page is stored on your chosen host’s server just as your Word document is stored on your hard drive.

In exactly the same way yo

nation products and maximize the revenues. But the companies involved in this practice are overlooking that they are burdening the patients both economically

open Microsoft Word application software then open a Word document when you want to work on it – when you want to edit something you have written, you can ‘open’ a web page that is sitting on any server anywhere in the worl

and physically. They need to rightly judge the benefits of the combination products and they have to even look at the risks involved when combining the produ

d. You do this by connecting to the Internet then opening the web page you want using the familiar www.anyname.com address.

The application software that makes this work sits on your PC and is called your ‘browser’. Everybo

ts. Some of the combination products were well accepted by physicians while others suffered. Companies involved in development of combination products are fi

y else connected to the Internet can view every web page in exactly the same way.

There is one important difference between your hard drive and a server, however. While you can edit your Word document on your PC, you cannot

ding difficulty in defining their combination products and facing various challenges from selecting a combination to marketing it.

Following aspects would a

‘edit’ web pages you view on the Internet – you can only read them.

(This is a simplification: you can, in fact, edit some web pages sometimes. You do this, for example, when you input your credit card details to order som

dd to the challenges in developing combination products:

Which markets to tap where the combination products can do fairly well?
Which combination prod

ething. We shall discuss this complication in more detail in Article Eighteen.)

To make this amazing system work, and work as well as it does, users have decided to work with a standard programming language called HTML (don

cts are meaningful and rational?
Which therapeutic categories to select?
Which Combinations can address unmet needs of the patients?
Do combin

t worry about what these letters mean).

Do this: connect to the Internet then open any web page that comes to mind. In the toolbar at the top of your browser to the left you will see the word ‘view’. Click on it and look at

tions increase the patient compliance?
What would be the developing cost?
How to tackle the risks encountered during combination product developmen

the drop-down menu. Click on the word ‘source’, and what you see is the HTML code that generates the page you are viewing.

Now that you know what HTML looks like, forget it, you don’t have to know anything about HTML to bu

t?

As combination products don't fit into the traditional categories of drugs, medical devices, or biological products, the USFDA is in the process of devel

ld web pages.

If you want to build a webpage you need several things (we shall just list them here and discuss them in more detail in Article Sixteen):

An Internet connection
You already have this if you are r

ping new procedures for reviewing their safety, efficacy and quality.

Professional from academic institutions, pharmaceutical industries, health care indust

eading this article on your PC.

A browser
You already have this, too. It came with your computer and you can’t connect to the Internet without it.

A host
You will have to fin

y and representatives from various regulatory agencies are working out to design the regulatory requirements for manufacture and sale of combination products

d one of these.

A domain name
You will have to choose and register one of these.

Webpage building software – sometimes called an ‘HTML editor’
This is not as bad as it sounds.<

.

As there is an increasing trend of the combination products companies manufacturing such products should be able to tackle the problems involved in the de

li>

Software to upload your pages to your host
Again, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

I think we’ve talked about this enough for this article. We shall look a little deeper in the next article.

T

elopment. They need to be wiser in analyzing the market trends and the regulatory requirements.

Companies that provide selfless information through particip

hat’s all for this time. See you soon.

Next time we shall talk about how you actually build a website (don’t panic!).

Thanks for listening :-)

Copyright © 2006 Mary Rice-Johnston & Golden Goose Direct. All rights reserved

tion in industry events and feedback to regulatory authorities would be able to face the challenges and will be successful in developing combination products

HTTP = HTML link (for blogs, profiles,phorums):
<a href="http://www.diggit.org.ua/article/30724/diggit-Notes-for-Newbies--Part-Fifteen--Your-Website.html">Notes for Newbies - Part Fifteen - Your Website</a>

BB link (for phorums):
[url=http://www.diggit.org.ua/article/30724/diggit-Notes-for-Newbies--Part-Fifteen--Your-Website.html]Notes for Newbies - Part Fifteen - Your Website[/url]

Part 3 of this continuing series of articles advicing businesses on questions they should be asking their contract cleaners.

Truth is…. it does not matter who is looking. If someone is looking it’s OK. If NOT, then that should also be OK with you. How can it be both ways? It’s who YOU are that makes the big difference in what you say or in what you do.

Are you working on a low budget for your conference, but still want to hand out conference gifts that make an impact? Conference gifts don't need to be expensive to be memorable.

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Digg It - Notes for Newbies - Part Fifteen - Your Website

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