As reported last week on the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce website, Medical Specialists® Pharmacy have now gone mobile! The introduction of mobile device compatible Medical Specialists® website was an urgent requirement for patients across the globe after the pharmacy giant was bombarded with frustrated patients that were struggling to successfully place their orders using a mobile phone or tablet. Medical Specialists® are pleased to announce this struggle has now been taken away with the launch of the mobile site…although the launch didn’t exactly go without any hitches! Simply put, the extraordinary traffic increase as mobile users surged onto the website ended up actually crashing it! The pharmacy certainly predicted an increase in the number of patients logging onto the site using their mobile phone or tablets, but were left a little gobsmacked by the massive user volume increase that resulted in their servers being overloaded and crashing to a temporarily standstill within just 8 hours of officially going live. Fortunately, the pharmacy’s IT department were swift to act, liaising with the server host to dramatically boost the server capacity, in addition to improving the maximum broadband speed, enabling patients to now have a trouble-free experience when accessing and browsing around the website. Obviously a website crash isn’t ideal for an online pharmacy of Medical Specialists® Pharmacy’s stature, but does reiterate a point they mentioned last week, that the modern day hectic lifestyle is causing an increasing number of people to now access the internet whilst on the go with their mobile devices and carrying out purchases on these, as opposed to sitting down at a computer. Therefore, it seems to be an absolute must for any modern-day business that operates a website and has aspirations of growth, to also have a functioning mobile-friendly version of the website or risk losing out on a massive potential customer base. Medical Specialists® used to be in contact with a high number of patients on a daily basis that had no other option than to telephone their ordering department to place an order for treatments ranging from asthma inhalers to hair loss, patients that had actually either tried and given up, or were simply unable to do the order with their mobile device. Therefore something needed to be done to cater for those on the go and using their phone or tablet to place an order, and the pharmacy’s only regret now is that it wasn’t implemented much sooner as the momentary website crash demonstrates there was an incredibly large demographic out there who’s needs weren’t being met. Managing Director David Bailey said, “Studies have shown that 48% of respondents using a mobile phone for the internet have encountered a website which proved difficult to read due to formatting issues, whilst 73% claim they have tried to access a website that was too slow to load – probably due to the fact the website wasn’t geared for mobiles and have extra/unnecessary text and images to load that were configured for a desktop browser.” Although their mobile website crashed, their desktop website was fine and suffered no problems. “People could still access our website, it was just those thousands of people all at the same time via our media story, that decided to access us via their mobile phone or tablets that caused the problem” said David. Now that their mobile website is back up and running, we asked David what were Medical Specialists next plans?  David said, “You’ll have to watch this space, as we have more products/medication to go on the website, and further expansion plan for the company, but in the meantime, our main concern is that all our patients are happy with our products and service. This would seem to be borne out by the fact that all our reviews rate us very highly.” Medical Specialists seem to have gone from strength to strength, changing and improving as they have gone along, for the last 14 years on the internet. They are now one of Manchester great success stories, and we hope to hear a lot more from them in the future.