Pregnant Women and new mums are getting the specialist exercise and lifestyle advice they need thanks to a new Internet business based in Bridgwater.

Bloomingfit (www.bloomingfit.com) is the brainchild of midwife and personal trainer Alison Merry, who had the idea for the business when running fitness classes for pre and post-natal women.

“I kept on being asked the same questions, particularly about the sort of everyday exercise they should be doing,” she says. “My background in midwifery and fitness gave me the knowledge they needed, and I realised a subscription-based website would give many more people the information they were looking for.”

Alison was working as a physiotherapist at the time, but she was so excited by the idea that she started on it part-time straightaway. “By last autumn, I realised I needed to go fulltime, so I took the jump,” she says.

Business partner Peter Gilpin, who is a leisure management professional, had previously worked with Connecting Somerset, the county-wide initiative that helps firms find and use the technological solutions they need for better business. Alison contacted them, and they helped her gain a grant to buy a PC. “That was extremely useful,” says Alison. They also told her about WSI, the local company she subsequently contracted to build the website.

She also went on a Connecting Somerset e-commerce training course, which she found very helpful in refining her thoughts about the site. “I learned about keyword optimisation, to help people find my site based on the words they put into a search engine like Google or Yahoo!,” she says. “It completely changed my ideas about what to write on the front page. It also gave me a grasp of some of the technology behind a website, which made me rethink the structure of the site to make it faster and easier to use.”

A few months on, and Bloomingfit is really taking off. Alison has thousands of visitors to the site every month, and membership numbers from across the UK are rising rapidly, partly driven by national media exposure. Alison is very excited, particularly because the site is too new as yet to be ranked on Google. “When that happens, I’m expecting even more interest,” she says.

So whenever you see a pregnant woman or new mum who’s bursting with health and vitality, it may just be that she owes it all to Bridgwater’s own Alison Merry and her bouncing new business.