Hello, I really appreciate your website. I think it offers nice overviews to therapies and research pertaining to them. I forwarded your site to a family with whom I work and they indicated they wished they had found it early on. I have two suggestions and the first one may already be something you do. First, I think it would be beneficial if you could get those places that come up in search engines (american autism society, center for the study of autism or the national institute of mental health) to include links to your site on their sites. Second, I would like to see your website include information about the history of autism spectrum disorders and how labels on the spectrum differ. Your site seems to be great for individuals who have a healthy knowledge about what autism is, what it looks like and how it can affect families and relationships (including this information in your site might be helpful to people with little knowledge of the disorder). Thanks for your work and good luck.
cron
Thank you for your kind and thoughtful comments.
Firstly, we are trying to get all of these organizations to link to us. Many have already done so. Many intend to do so but haven't yet. And, some we haven't yet contacted. We would encourage you and other visitors to ask your favorite sites to link to us. That will definitely help more folks to find us.
As for the second point... Multiple people have now said this to us and so we may do this. We had always intended www.HealingThresholds.com to come in at a later point in the process - once the family already had a diangosis or had concerns that they wanted to approach therapeutically. It seems that other organizations offered good background on autism. One place we point people is to the CDC's Learn the Signs. Act Early Campaign (http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/ActEarly/). I apprecaite your feedback though and we will mull over how best to address this.
One other thought I would like to put out there is that we are still seeking sponsors to underwrite the cost of this site. To date this has been a personal nvestment of time and money by a small team of people. The site is quite expensive to maintain because we update the content daily with research and news summaries and we manage and expand the community center daily. Although only 6 months old, many people have found us and recommend us to friends and colleagues and visit the site many times. While we are actively pursuing commercial sponsorship, we would also welcome any ideas from the community.
Thank you,
PWSMom