Pacman Dental Retainer? Sure!

Pacman is celebrating it's 30th anniversary this year and to help celebrate, Google designed a working version of it's logo as a pacman game! How cute. I played, and it rocked!

Now due to popular web demand, google is permanently keeping this page up so that you can get your pacman fix anytime, here:

Google Packman Fix

We have the "real" version on our website here:
Real Packman Fix


Now, our dental lab is celebrating it's 25th anniversary this year, and we have a retainer design that celebrates the pacman lover in all of us. Check it out in our preset gallery, page 4:
See the Packman Dental Retainer




We're all about equality, so we also have Ms.Pacman! You say why put pacman on a dental retainer? I say WHY NOT??!!!

PACMAN FOREVER

Busy Busy Busy...

...answering your retainer questions! I've been spending time on Yahoo answering some awesome (and some seriously wacky) dental retainer questions. If you want to see the questions I've answered so far, check it out here:

MY ANSWERS

I'm up to about 120 questions answered, and my answers are chosen on average 49% of the time as being the "Best Answer".

Just to peak your curiosity, the question that wins my "wackiest retainer question award" is the following one about closing a tooth gap with...?toilet paper?.

See my response: Instant Fix?

Award for "gross out question of the week" goes to this one:

Just ewwww

You can vote on the answers if you are have a yahoo community profile.

Slideshows of Retainer Pics

Oh just for fun. Very nice website that lets you create your own slide shows. So Easy.

Check mine out

You can make your own with any photos. I had these already uploaded on flickr, so it just let me import them instantly. If you have photos uploaded on any service anywhere you can do the same. Lets you choose from many preset slideshow styles, and add whatever music you want (from a music library)

Two new articles published.

I've been busy. I've written two new articles for my Hub Pages account, that I think are pretty darn good :)

First one is on our EMA anti-snoring devices:
http://hubpages.com/hub/custom-dental-device-stop-snoring

Second one is to help parents with teens who don't want to wear their retainers:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Help-me-get-my-child-to-wear-their-retainer

Hopefully this will help some people out there. I enojoyed writing these, so maybe someone will find them not just helpful, but also entertaining.

Cheers!

Hello Orthodontists!

This post is going to ask a few questions instead of just providing entertainment. As you can tell by my blog title, this website is about the web application that our dental lab (Aorta Dental Lab) has developed.

Questions:

1. Do orthodontists like providing more choices to their patients when it comes time for them to choose a retainer?
2. Do orthodontists prescribe traditional hawley retainers (wires and acrylic) or the invisible retainers more often.
3. Do orthodontists see allowing more design options as generally a benificial thing, or more of a hassle than anything else?
4. Do orthodontists think that patients want the option to design their own retainers (ie choose from many options), or does it not make a difference to the patient?
5. Do orthodontists see a value and think that their profits can be positively affected by offering numerous 'designer" options for dental retainers.
6. Do orthodontists feel that an online system that simplifies choosing a design (for the patient) and adding a prescription (for the dental pro) would be helpful and efficient?

I think that my main question to orthodontists is would you be willing to try out a system at your dental office that involved patients choosing their designs online, and someone from your office adding their presciptions and sending it to the lab over the internet?

What, if anything would keep you from implementing such a system?

What would entice you to try such a system?

Feel free to comment on any of these questions.

I love toolbars!

Well I do. I really like the one I created for our site and people are starting to download it like crazy! That's not why i like it though :)

I like it because I find it useful. I love the email notification. It notifys your desktop via the system tray so no matter how absorbed I am with what I'm doing, my email inbox gets my attention! For me that's a good thing because I'd go way too long between checking my emails and end up missing important stuff.

Also I like having the weather up there - I can see it at a glance and that is SO, unlike global warming, convenient.

And the new BOX widget that allows me to share folders (for free!) with anyone over the internet. It's so simple to use I could cry!

Where was this stuff a few years ago? My life would have been much less stressful.
Ah - the "internets".

Well lets say you've seen my toolbar HERE and you're saying to yourself (in your head...or maybe even out loud)...

BOY would I love to have one of those for my site!! I want my own toolbar with my own logo :(

Well no worries, I've gotcha covered. Click Here My Friends, and all the worlds riches shall be yours!
Well...at the very least your very own toolbar will be yours.

And DONT WORRY - its so easy I could have done it back in 1999; before I knew all about the "internets" :)

Here is a lovely banner to click if you so prefer:

Good news today, 2 signups for the aortadesigner.com website (the full version, not the demo). This means that there is more interest out there from the Orthodontists. Maybe not the spectacular results I was hoping for, but maybe I was being a bit overly optimistic in this economy.

I personally think the website can help improve business for any of the orthodontists that register with us. Theses are the days where personalized service and custom made products are in high demand. People want choice - with everything! So offering a wide selection of custom retainer designs to patients can definately raise the satisfaction factor. If the patient is thrilled with how their retainer looks when they get it, chances are that they will be more engaged with their treatment, and take better care of it.

Kids like having the choice, and now i think that so many kids and teens are web savvy, that using the site to design their retainers will be second nature to them. I see a future where dental offices that do not offer an online design option will fall behind those that do. I say this because even though Orthodontists may have been slow to jump on board, patients have been contacting us about how they can get their retainers made!

We've gotten sign-ups with our demo site from all over the world, not just Canada & the US, but also Germany, Italy, and Austrailia. One such person emailed us to ask how she could get her dentist to get a retainer design from us because , and I quote:

"i really want a nice retainer that i will love forever"

And she loved the designs on our site. This is the type of thing that is common with teens and kids -if they think it's cool they want it and their not afraid to ask for it.

Kudos to them.

No Sign-Ups today!! Oh the horror...

Yep, it's been a quiet day. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..

Checking my stats, no sign-ups only a few visists to the site. I'm a bit dismayed as I've sent out two hundred post cards advertising our service to orthodontists. I've been expecting a few extra people stopping by this week but has not happened.

I blame the weather - it's been too nice outside for people to be inside infront of their screens.

Oh well - hopefully next week will be better. I find that fridays are always kinds slower on the site - if today was bad then I don't expect tomorrow to be much better.

If you are reading this stop by our site = http://aortadesigner.com/
I'll feel better :).

PS. cheer me up more by downloading my toolbar

Cheers!
Em.

Create your own toolbar? COOL!

I have to say I love this. I'm not a huge fan of free stuff over the internet, I find it cheap and cheesy like most people, but the idea of creating your own applications that you can distribute (for free) to users of your website...well that changes my mind a bit.

Especially if the thing you develop is pretty darn good. For website owners who do not have programming knowlege to deveop things from scratch, this really does the trick. I am talking about making your own browser toolbar - meaning it's branded with your company logo and built from components chosen by you.

The best part is that it's easy and quick to make - and it's really useful (i find). I built my toolbar at a site called conduit. Apparently it's been around a few years, but I never stumbled onto it before. Now that i've been deep into website development for aortadesigner.com, I've been looking into marketing strategies more - and this came up.

Check out our toolbar, even download it if you like (I'd love it if you did!).

Here's the info page I created that highlights our toolbar features:
http://aortadesigner.com/toolbar

Here's the download page:
http://aortadesigner.ourtoolbar.com/

Want to make your own?
http://conduit.com/

P.S - there's no pop ups, spyware or viruses - it's a certified trusted download so there's no risk.
Happy toolbaring!

Em.

New Blog about designing retainers

Here we go...

I'm not sure how many blogs there are about dental retainer designs - my guess is probably none. Here's to being the first! If i'm wrong about that you can let me know :)

Since the begining of this year our dental lab has been working on a website that lets people design their own retainers online. I't been quite the experience. Not as easy as I thought it would be but finally we've got it up and running. Of course, as with all websites there is more to do, but hopefully we'll get some feedback as we keep on with it.

Maybe the site will develop into a small community of sorts. It would be great to see lots of kids teens and young adults who are about to get their braces off come to our site and create their own personal design. I'm curious to see what people come up with.

Our goal is also to bring some joy to people. I used to wear retainers myself, so I know that they are not always the most comfortable in the world (especially when you are 10 or 11 years old!).
But now as an adult, i'm glad I had them as my teeth are very nice and straight. So it's worth it.

I've had two sets -both were colorful.
My first set were purple with glitter (loved them)
Second set were rainbow (not my favorite, but they looked nice anyway)

Hopefully some kids out there will feel better about the fact that they have to get retainers by being able to create their own design for them.

So far our demo site has been up since March 2010, and we have 17 member that have joined to try it out. We had one new sign-up today!

Maybe more tomorrow?...

http://demo.aortadesigner.com/

Cheers!
Em.