I’m excited to tell you about my new client, Ruth-Ellen Wiersma. She is a health coach and the owner of RE Wellness Health, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan most of the year. She also works out of Tampa, Florida for about 4 months each year. She can work with clients in either location–or around the world, for that matter, thanks to the use of technology! She uses Skype, email, and phone calls to assist her non-local clients.

Ruth-Ellen had a previous website through the Integrative Health and Nutrition Institute, where she received her training, but it wasn’t meeting all of her needs and didn’t have the functionality that she wanted from her website. By moving her to a WordPress website, I was able to create a site that she can truly love. The redesign also gave us the opportunity to customize the look and feel of the site to reflect her personality, which a website should always do. Why? Great question! By allowing your visitors to see your personality, you are giving them the opportunity to get to know you–and people do business with people they KNOW, like, and trust!

In addition to the static content that Ruth-Ellen had on her previous website, I was able to suggest some more dynamic content ideas after learning about her business and goals for her business. She has enthusiastically embraced these dynamic suggestions and I’ve been really proud of her for stepping out of her comfort zone to learn and implement new technology and skills.

Ruth-Ellen had a section on her old website with healthy recipes–an auto-feed from Integrative Health and Nutrition over which she had minimal control. On her redesign, we implemented a blog that she could use for education, news, thoughts, and yes, recipes. By assigning the category tag of “Recipe” to each recipe, she now has an archive of all of her recipes, searchable on-site, as well as a category page in her navigation menu. Anyone reading a recipe in her blog can also click on the “Recipe” link to see the most recent recipes that have been added and page through just the recipes, if that is their interest. Ruth-Ellen has also written several educational articles and articles about her personal experiences in her blog. I taught Ruth-Ellen how to blog with WordPress and how to add recipes through the specialized plugin for this purpose during a phone call of less than an hour of time. She now feels that she has a lot more control over the content on her website.

Another recommendation that I gave to Ruth-Ellen, after our initial consultation, was that she start podcasting. This sounded kind of scary at first, but after talking it through, she decided that she wanted to give it a try. She recorded a conversation/interview with a friend of hers who is a book author and did a very nice job with it. She sent it to me via email. I uploaded the file to her site, added some content about the author and her book, and put an MP3 player in the article on the Podcast page. Once that was done, I set up her account in iTunes. Anyone in the world can now automatically download her podcasts to their computers, iPods, and mobile devices by simply subscribing to the podcast on their iTunes account.

One more notable thing that I was able to change for Ruth-Ellen was the way her email subscription list was set up. I changed her from one provider to another with the same capabilities and save her $20 per month! As a small business owner, myself, I understand the importance of keeping costs low and how small expenses can add up and eat away at your bottom line, so I try to pass my experience along to my clients and save them a little money with free or low-cost tools whenever I can.

I hope you’ll take a minute to visit RE Wellness Heath and give me your feedback! If you know of someone, like Ruth-Ellen, who might need to redesign their website to give them more control or functionality, I would love warm introduction to talk with them to see how I can help.