Designing a Website For the Wellness Industry

Wellness is the latest buzzword in the health industry. With all of the ways that our lives can seemingly go awry, from everything from the flu, to obesity, to heart disease, to genetic disorders, to mental problems of a psychological, emotional, or sociological nature, to overall physical fitness, and more, it seems that there is a free website capitalizing on it. “Wellness” is a broad umbrella term used to describe an industry dedicated to “healthy living”. Healthy living entails adopting lifestyle changes to live a healthy, happy, and long life through natural, holistic means. The doctrines of wellness run counter to today’s prescription pill-popping obsessed society, in that all of life’s ailments and maladies can be cured or prevented through natural remedies or through the exertion of natural effort.

Choosing a Niche For Your Wellness Website

When designing a free website with wellness as its theme, it is important to consider who is your intended audience. Men? Women? Young people? The elderly? Educated professionals? The wealthy? The poor? Housewives? Different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds? Everybody? Choosing your demographic is very important, as it narrows your focus, potentially increasing your website conversion rates, and increasing your website’s profitability.

Wellness is a very broad subject that encompasses many niches. It is essential that you choose a specific niche you wish to focus on. Mental health? Physical health? Disease prevention? Nutrition? Weight loss? Strength training? Digestive health? There are a myriad of angles with which to broach the wellness niche. Or do you want your website to be all-encompassing, of a broad and general nature, leaving the playing field open to tackle any and every wellness issue that may be of general interest to your visitors?

Since your aim is no doubt to attract visitors to your website and retain them, and then eventually to convert them into paying customers, then there are certain design elements you need to take into consideration when developing a wellness ecommerce website:

#1 – Offer FREE Information

While you may feel that offering too much information for free might make your free website unprofitable, the opposite is actually true. The more free information you provide your readers, the more credibility your website will gain as an authoritative source on issues of wellness. And credibility breeds trust. When your visitors feel that they can trust you as a credible source of information, they will be more apt to take you seriously and buy from you when you present them with an offer to purchase a wellness product from your website or subscribe to a membership-based website service. The last thing you want to do is be a pushy salesman, trying to ram products or services down your visitors’ throats.

#2 – Connect With Your Visitors

“Stickiness” is a new buzzword to describe how well a particular website is able to persuade visitors to either stay on your website or to return back to your website over and over again. You cannot expect to make a sale off of a visitor’s initial visit to your website. And if you aren’t taking steps to make that visitor’s experience “sticky”, then it could very well be his or her last visit to your website. A couple of ways of making your website sticky include: Offering an opt-in newsletter that delivers free wellness information periodically; or, hosting a blog on your website that you update frequently, which the reader can subscribe to for update notifications; or, enabling your website to be shared via one of the popular, well-known social media networks such as Facebook; or, by hosting free forums for discussion on your website that allows visitors to interact with one another and discuss wellness topics or discuss the products or services you are offering through your free website.

#3 – Personalize The User Experience

One way to make your wellness website stand out from among the rest is to enable the visitor to personalize their experience on your website. Allow visitors to create a username and password to log on to a special web page where they can maintain their own profiles. Allow them to create their own wellness programs, read content on topics of interest to them, track their progress in terms of weight loss or muscle building, and keep an online journal of sorts. Personalization will empower your visitors to rely on your website as a credible source of knowledge and coaching to improve their own measure of wellness in their lives.

Incorporating these 3 important elements into your free website, centered around a niche within the wellness industry, will go a long way in increasing reader loyalty and improving your website conversions.

Author Bio: Maria Wixman Website Builder by WIX.com I have been in the online marketing industry for over two years and love all things related to e-marketing,writing for the web, SEO and SEM.

Category: Internet
Keywords: free website,ecommerce website,free forums,web page