How to launch a new product in a new market?

Designers: What would you include if you were to launch a health/fitness website for women? This will be a information product site.  How would you tell a story using themes? What coding would you use? I would really love your opinion. New to the market..

• Answer:

  First you need an outline of the types of information you want to present. I very strongly advise that you have at least a list, but at best a schematic. This is more important than anything else. Then look for a WordPress Theme that will best accommodate your list. Make sure it can still accommodate your list if your list expands. You will not need to write much code. You will be working with PHP, MYSQL, HTML and .css. The fundamentals are very easy to pick up once you overcome the 'intimidation factor.' There is (was) an interesting Wordpress Theme that allowed topics to be presented behind five photos that appeared above the Header. The photos could be titled, and slid open when clicked. This theme still allowed for a full featured blog. It's called Sliding-Door Theme. ...but use what best fits your schematic. If you need a place to host try Baremetal. They have 24/7 support and are very patient. I do not work for Baremetal. I would not have been able to survive without them. Keep in mind that WordPress pages can be extremely flexible. Several National Canadian Television stations used them for a while. To make them look really professional you will generally need to play with fonts and shrink font sizes. You can embed YouTube, and links to other people's sites from them and you can broadcast your own live and stored video from them (although setting up stand alone video is another story.) You can design from within them with very little coding required so that they have little similarity to standard blog or database pages. This is your 'how to begin answer'. With any luck you will get more respondents and they will NOT tell you to code strictly in HTML and .css and let the site 'evolve' which could have you mired in a disorganized mess, that requires multitudinous redesigns, forever:)) If you are looking for ideas for content--well that's the crunch on the internet these days. You will need to have a lot of survey style conversations in 'real life' and become extremely proficient at what I call googling the periphery. This merely means you don't google for the obvious and chose the least obvious (and often, therefore, most interesting) results. Be careful not to infringe copy rights. Most copyrighted sites will indicate that a copyright is in force. The idea is not to pilfer but to find inspiration:)) Once your site is sufficiently established, writers, photographers and artists MIGHT offer submissions. Try to compensate them in some way. You might try searching Quora for content and ideas. I have seen gems buried in answers written by women that give indications of changing attitudes and trends. (An edit (as an afterthought) we need to redefine or rename Feminism. There is still change needed, but it is a wholly different kind of change. In some contexts it works well to reference it as gender bias.)  it is perpetrated as much by women as men. I feel that many women are still not aware of their many options. Now sexual discrimination has gone global! Informed autonomous decisions that women make for themselves should always be respected, but I fear there are women everywhere in the world who do not yet feel they have the right to make these choices in the same way that men do. ...but this is an uninteresting discussion without specific examples, which would put me more off topic.)