Health portal provides wellness information and community for baby boomers and seniors.
Managed by HealthandAge and sponsored by Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications, HealthAndAge.com provides health and wellness resources to baby boomers and older generations. The health portal offers tips on how to communicate effectively with healthcare professionals as well as information on how to identify, understand, prevent and treat a wide variety of medical conditions.
The Challenge
In the early 2000s, HealthandAge.com was one of the top five health websites in the world, with approximately two million unique visitors per month. However, over time, it began to lose its high ranking. When Boomerang Pharmaceutical Communications acquired HealthandAge late in 2007, the company embarked on a plan to fully revamp the health portal.
Boomerang executives wanted HealthandAge.com to once again become the trusted health and wellness resource for baby boomers and older generations. They envisioned social features that would allow for a strong online community, encouraging health and wellness discussions among site visitors. In addition, Boomerang saw this community as a venue to educate potential clinical trial participants about their ongoing pharmaceutical studies.
The Solution
After coordinating with Boomerang about their specific goals for HealthandAge.com — providing relevant information, increasing traffic and user engagement, and building Boomerang’s pool of potential clinical trial participants — it was determined that a modular approach to site design was the best solution.
A more sophisticated, modular CMS was assembled to help solve the technical hurdles site authors and editors faced when developing and publishing content. With modules, administrators can now organize new site pages, or update the layout of existing pages to include modules for advertisements, featured content and relevant clinical trial information.
“Major content areas of the site, like news, articles and FAQs, make up the basic framework and are linked together by health topics,” said Tito Espinoza, content management expert. “‘Add-ons,’ such as accompanying clinical trials, forums and commenting functionality were developed as modules. This gives site administrators the ability to easily customize pages as needed, and allows visitors to see all relevant information on a particular topic on one page.”
The portal includes modules that enable simple site navigation to help guide site visitors to relevant content, based on their search queries and viewed articles. Social features help connect regular visitors with like-minded individuals, building online communities for people with similar health ailments and interests.
An automated search engine optimization (SEO) wizard helps authors optimize the content in every article they submit. These SEO features help drive traffic to the portals when potential visitors are searching for relevant terms.
In addition, new analytics software allows site authors and editors to view the results of their contributions, enabling them to determine the usefulness and relevancy of specific articles to site visitors.
Results
HealthandAge.com.com was launched in July 2009, and is seeing success in its early months. Average time on site has increased 68 percent, bounce rate has decreased 20 percent and page views per visitor has gone up 28 percent since relaunch.
Visitors can easily search the site by keyword, health topics or most popular articles. They can also search their own activity by viewing favorite links, recently viewed pages and recent forum discussions. These forums, as well as portal-hosted groups, provide visitors with an opportunity to engage with others facing similar health and wellness challenges, and to share stories and successes. Online community members can create personal profile pages, participate in discussions, and sign up for email and RSS updates from the site.
“Knowing that our main audience is comprised of baby boomers and other individuals who haven’t grown up using the web, it was important to us that HealthandAge.com be easy to understand and navigate,” said Salah Benzakour, marketing director of HealthandAge.com. “The solution provided both the design and features needed to guide visitors around the website, helping them find information and connect with similar individuals. We’re really able to connect with our target audience and build a trusted health portal and online community.”
With the new HealthandAge site live and performing strong, Boomerang now plans to expand its online presence with soon-to-be-launched sites based on the HealthandAge.com platform. The portal will be restructured for European markets, translated and launched as NovoViva in France, Germany and Spain. Additionally, the company plans to launch a portal designed for healthcare professionals, where they can share information with each other in a secure environment.
Drupal CMS was used as the core open source component due to its performance as a modular platform. Leveraging the standard capabilities of Drupal modules and extending them for customization, we assembled a site framework that provides Boomerang with all of the major features that the company desired. For site authors, this includes the ability to author, organize, feature and optimize site content. Site administrators were given more controls to edit, publish and manage articles, multimedia and advertisements, as well as to moderate group discussions. For visitors, this includes the functionality to search site content, rate and comment on articles, join discussion groups, change text size and easily navigate the site.
With the health portal’s core demographic in mind, we developed several key components to aid in site navigation, including a “breadcrumb” which shows a visitor exactly where he or she is located on the site, navigation menus that change colors once they are activated and an option to increase or decrease font size for easier readability.
Clinical trial modules, which have a direct impact on Boomerang’s business operations, were designed to take visitors to interactive forms that screen potential trial participants. Visitors determined as viable study candidates, after providing their home address, are shown an interactive map with the locations of the nearest study centers.
We developed content management controls to allow site authors and editors to easily upload, edit and feature new site content — keeping information fresh, timely and relevant. Metatags and categories offer the functionality to logically organize articles and multimedia content, controlling where information appears on the site. New file systems for inserting images and video were developed that allow for simple inclusion of dynamic content.
Automated controls were implemented, offering specified levels of administrative access to personnel based on their rank and responsibilities. Articles can appear in multiple areas of the site, such as within a given topic and as a featured article on the home page, with only a few commands from site administrators.
With the support of our expertise in cloud computing, Boomerang deployed HealthandAge.com using Amazon EC2 cloud hosting.
