Prevention: Nurturing a Website Back to Health

Prevention is the best medicine

How do I eat right? What's the best workout? Why am I in pain? These are among the questions that Prevention magazine, one of the nation's leading healthy-lifestyle brands, answers for its legions of loyal subscribers. Prevention boasts a circulation of 2.8 million, numerous editions around the world and more than 10 million monthly readers who also gain access to the website, which generates 2.6 million unique visitors every month and 22 million page views. With such a large audience, quality, performance and reliability are of paramount importance.

As competing websites in this fast-growing niche offered more interactive elements and advanced features, Prevention.com needed a complete overhaul. Breathing new life into this healthy brand meant improving usability and searchability as well as enhancing site performance so that it could handle large traffic spikes and page views.

Site building for healthy living

Having built successful websites for other Rodale properties - including MensHealth.com, WomensHealthMag.com and Fitbie.msn.com - NorthPoint was keenly aware of how to deliver the vision for Prevention.com's new web presence.

To meet the challenges of a large, high-traffic site, we chose Drupal on a LAMP stack, a suite of powerful Open Source tools known for providing tremendous flexibility for content creation, content management and display. We worked closely with Prevention's editorial team to architect and develop a solution that revolutionizes both the internal business of running an enterprise-scale website and the brand's overall web presence.

Our team created a revamped user interface utilizing HTML 5, CSS and jQuery, giving editors an easy-to-use and easy-to-navigate UI across all browsers and mobile devices. This also enhanced performance, reduced page weight and improved load times. Using our breadth of skills and technology expertise, we were able to seamlessly migrate nearly a decade's worth of content and provide uninterrupted access to both old and new content. In addition, a combination of HTML 5 compliance and RSS feeds provides another means for accessing content as well as a reliable way for apps to gather and present Prevention content. We also consolidated different publishing and content management systems onto Drupal, allowing all of the content types to be efficiently managed and manipulated.

As part of our strategy to equip clients with the right tools to manage their website, we provided training materials and hosted training and Q&A sessions.

Fit for life

Redesigning Prevention's website and converting to a new platform is paying off for the brand. January 2012 was the site's best month in history, with more than 3.2 million unique visitors - a 44 percent increase over the last year. In addition, Rodale realized enormous cost reduction benefits by virtually removing all licensing fees associated with the old platform. The improved structure and functionality have led to a 20 percent increase in natural search traffic. Since the redesign, advertising revenue has increased 13 percent year-over-year.

With a modern look, state-of-the-art web platform and improved site performance that stands up to normal and peak traffic, Prevention.com is moving in a new and healthier direction.