ElderWeb Background
ElderWeb was created by Karen Stevenson, a CPA and a consultant with over 19 years of experience in long term care, finance, and technology. Over its eight years of existence, ElderWeb has grown to include thousands of reviewed links to long term care information, a searchable database of organizations, and an expanding library of articles and reports, news, and events.
This award-winning site is designed to be a research site for both professionals and family members looking for information on eldercare and long term care, and includes links to information on legal, financial, medical, and housing issues, as well as policy, research, and statistics. Thousands of other sites link to ElderWeb, and it has received numerous Web awards and press mentions. ElderWeb has been used extensively by journalists and students doing research, and by professionals looking for Internet resources, as well as by family members looking for help for their elderly relatives.
I first developed the concept and wrote all the code for these pages in 1994, when the browser of choice was Mosaic and I had to hand code everything in HTML. I didn't have any idea at the time how large this project would grow, I just had trouble finding good long term care information on the Web and decided to post the links I found in a Web page for others to use. I had to search hard to find anything on eldercare on the Web in 1994. At that time, most of the sites on these pages did not exist. Many of my early links were text pages in gophers, and the information posted was nothing more than a list of phone numbers to call to get "real" information.
Since then I have completely remodeled the site several times. There is a huge amount of eldercare information now, and it's growing rapidly. Links now take you directly to lengthy articles about eldercare topics, sites where you can search for services by state, county, and even zip code, information about how to apply for Medicaid in various states, and much more. My goal is to include as much direct on-line information as possible, so someone like a worried adult caregiver browsing at 3 AM is not forced to wait until normal business hours to get help. As much as possible, I try to take you directly to online articles, rather than send you to a site's home page where you have to guess where the information might be.
I am revising the site to make it more accessible to handicapped-enabled and text-only browsers. I keep working at new ways to improve the time it takes to load pages, and I'm always trying to make the site easier to navigate. There are no frames on this site, so you can safely bookmark pages and get right back to them, rather than ending up at the home page, as happens with most sites which use frames. When I find articles buried in sites with frames, I have linked you to the unframed page, so you don't have to dig around the site to find it.
I plan to continue to develop and expand ElderWeb. I hope you find it helpful!