We had a chat with our other joint Website of the Month winner for October, iBodz.com health and fitness website. If you’re interested in entering our Website of the Month contest, you can nominate your site here.

Tell us a bit about iBodz.com and where the idea for the site came from.

Being a web designer and a qualified Personal Trainer I decided to combine my skillsets and give people an online personal trainer. One-on-one personal training is always going to be the best option for achieving your goals but in the real world not everybody can afford the expense of a personal trainer, so my aim was to give as many of the benefits of a personal trainer to our visitors for free via the web.

What makes iBodz different to other exercise and fitness websites out there?

The exercise library we have is very user friendly, we have spent a lot of time and effort on making sure it shows the exercise correctly (with professional photography) as well as providing the necessary techniques and tips to ensure its performed safely. We also have a vast library of articles and exercise programs that are searchable to members. Best of all, our site is FREE…

At this time of year it’s hard to get motivated to exercise – what are your top tips for exercising when it’s cold and dark?

A lot of exercises can be done indoors, you don’t need a load of equipment, with a set of dumbbells and a fitball you can do a full workout. If it is an activity that cant be done indoors like running you want to do then how about these:

 

 

  • Running with a friend or family member is always a good way to help motivate each other

• Get a new album on your ipod that you are excited about, this can take your mind off the actual run. I personally enjoy listening to a comedy podcast on my iPod to take me away

• It’s no surprise that you need to wrap up warm when training outside in the winter, but lots of people fail to wear gloves or hats – this is where you will lose most of your body heat.

How have you promoted iBodz.com so far and how successful has it been?

We use Facebook quite a bit to interact with our members. A lot of our traffic comes from organic search as well. There has been some press coverage as well as other sites linking to our content which all helps increase our traffic.

iBodz is very user-friendly and all the information is easily accessible. What tips would you give someone looking to organise their website content more effectively?

Think about the site layout and navigation right at the beginning of the process of setting up a new site or a redesign of an existing site. A good tip is to ask someone who has no idea about your product/service and see where they would expect to find certain content within your site hierarchy. As an example, if you are a financial advisor and have a website where you want to advertise 10 different services you offer, the way you categorise each of these services would not necessarily be the way the average user would expect to see these services appear in your navigation. Customers wont always understand the industry terminology. ALWAYS try to put yourself in the mind of the uninformed user or even better, find yourself one and ask their thoughts.

Why did you choose Heart Internet to host iBodz?

Features and price, but most importantly the excellent customer service you guys provide 🙂 Price and features are nothing without reactive support.

How did you go about asking people to vote for you in the Website of the Month contest?

Facebook, blog post and friends

How do you plan to develop iBodz further in the future?

We are constantly adding new features to iBodz.com. At the moment we are planning an iPhone app that will allow you to search and save programs to your account and then access these anywhere, regardless of whether you have a net connection or not. We are also in the process of developing a new feature that will allow members to track their progress within their account and see these in charts and graphs.