When I talked with Dr Alvarez about the purpose of her site, the plans for her practice and her target audience my suggestion was to create a WordPress site to accommodate the current needs and be flexible and scalable for future usage. Dr Alvarez had some colors she wanted to use and wanted a minimalist Zen-styled look and feel to the site. So, I custom designed a very simple theme that matched the color scheme she wanted and fit the style she was looking for. I titled this WordPress theme, SkylineZen. You will not find any fancy sliders, rotating headers, or ad rotators on this site. However, it does provide the functionality and matches the design that Dr Alavarez desired; and allowed her to be able to have her interim VistaPrint website closed and that url pointed to here new site. In other words, you can access Dr Alvarez at http://www.kathyalvarezmd.com or at http://www.partnersinwellnessswpdx.com SkylineZen is not currently available on the Wordress.org site.

In the past, Dr Wright had maintained this practice as a walk-in clinic. However, Dr Alvarez wanted to convert the practice so that patients scheduled appointments rather than having walk-ins. Accordingly, I asked Dr Alvarez if she wanted her patients to be able to schedule appointments from her site. She thought that would be a great idea, so I added a plugin to the site that would provide this option to visitors on the site. The result of this website and the online scheduling has been a resounding success…

… per a recent comment from Dr Alvarez …

… thanks Tom
the feedback on the website and the scheduling has been all positive!

Dr Alvarez has not yet had time to start blogging, so I have disabled the display of blog posts until she is ready to start blogging and publishing articles on her site.

… may soon be under the scrutiny of the FTC.

Clamping down on blogs and bloggers who post tainted endorsements and who make incredible claims, will be quite a task, in and of itself. Enforcement should prove interesting, especially with many blogs being written by people not residing in the United States. Monitoring and addressing deceptive advertising in other forms of social media presents other interesting questions and dilemmas. For example, on Twitter, how can a twit make an incredible claim and disclaim it; plus add a clickable link; all in a 140 characters or less? That would be the challenge for tweets; should they fall under the new scrutiny of the FTC. Once the FTC identifies violators, then what will they do and how will they be able to eradicate the problems?

Although I am opposed to censoring personal expression, I am supportive of maintaining ethics in advertising of all types. To that extent, I believe claims and endorsements in blogs and tweets need to be truthful and forthright; no different than in traditional forms of advertising. If you make claims about your personal results, first and foremost, those claims need to be factual. If you say you are making $50,000 per day, you need to be able to prove you are consistently making $50,000 per day. If you say you have a system that will generate a gazillion users, followers, clicks, or whatever, then you need to be able to prove you have been able to consistently produce those results. If, however, that statement is not factual and provable and you benefited due to actions of others in reliance upon your claims; then you should be liable for all damages sustained by those who relied upon the deceptive statements. Second, in this same example, in the event you are actually realized the results claimed and this realization is not a typical result, then the typical results need to also be stated conspicuously. A simple disclaimer saying these results are not typical is not enough. Ideally, these two rules would be applied similarly to other endorsements and claims; whether they are for weight loss, improved health, or any other quantifiable results. Additional comments relative hereto were recently solicited by the FTC, as noted in the FTC Endorsement Guide

As a side note, although beyond the scope of the newly planned monitoring of blogs by the FTC, this author believes that equally important to consumers and taxpayers, are elections, ballot measures and political campaigns; some of the biggest violators of deception in advertising in this country. Truth in advertising, because of the gravity and magnitude of the potential damage in the election and campaign process, transcends civil damages. Deception at this level should be prosecuted criminally; as egregious felonies or acts of treason.