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WellnessWelt LogoWellnessWelt WebsiteWellnessWelt Display

Case Study: WellnessWelt.de

Introduction and Overview

WellnessWelt.de aspires to be a premium portal for Germany's growing Wellness Industry. It is the one-stop-shop conceptualised by 3T Nails and created by Sitewards, for end-users, service providers, retailers and suppliers to find the products and services they need. Sitewards created the powerful WellnessWelt.de portal with beautiful design and is now preparing to support the parent company 3T Nails' plans to market it.

Business Needs

As Germany's Wellness industry gathers steam, there are few portals that can serve the needs of end-consumers, service providers, retailers and suppliers alike. It is difficult, if not painful to find the best Beauty Salon, Nail Studio or Cosmetics shop in the neighbourhood without doing extensive research by personally visiting many of them. WellnessWelt ('the feel-good portal') aims to eliminate this problem by creating an extensive, virtual and searchable Wellness-World (Welt is 'world' in German), where each participant of the industry can find others in the Wellness and Beauty industry.

Key Challenges

Right from the beginning, it was clear that a robust technological system was needed to hold, maintain and tweak the data about the thousands of members of the portal. This would also ensure that these members gain the most out of the portal. A beautiful 'look' and a comfortable 'feel' were necessary for the users to feel at home.

Solution(s)

When 3T Nails approached Sitewards with the idea, the Sitewards team quickly created the utility-based 4-layer architecture for the portal and laid it out before the customer. With the 'go ahead' for implementing this architecture, 3T also gave them complete freedom to decide on the design, functionality and the user interface for the portal.

Some important features of WellnessWelt.de include:

  • Currently about 50.000 addresses online.
  • The portal is now capable of registering several thousand more users, Wellness studios, suppliers and so on.
  • It supports a need-based search with selectable options and gives results ordered by geographical distance to the user's location.
  • Rating System - users can write down their comments on wellness service providers and rate the listed companies.
  • It shows advertisements based on the search terms entered by the user. The number of times each ad was displayed and the clicks on these ads is counted and maintained for 3T to be able to make ad-based revenue.
  • The portal has an Education section - an area for Wellness-studios and future Wellness-specialists (fitness experts, make-up artists, hair dressers, nail designers etc.) to find each other.
  • A lexicon section gives a one-point reference of terms and acronyms from the Wellness industry.
  • There is also a large section that gives information about Health Resorts and Hotels providing 'wellness' care and services.

The Sitewards team designed the portal on PHP-MySQL back-end running on Apache server, making the combination free of licence costs and extremely sturdy at the same time. It also created the user interface for the customer to manage imports of the data objects. For the customer's interface, the team used the easier-to-manage MS Access system that used an ODBC interface to load the data to the MySQL database. For advanced content management features and ad control on the website, Sitewards set up its Web-Object-Manager based system including its easy to use password-protected backend.