How Do I Sign Nebraska Banking PDF

How do i industry sign banking nebraska pdf fast

alright well my clock says new so I think we'll go ahead and get started you may hear a few more times as people hop on but hopefully they won't be too distracting I'm Heidi garden from grona braska you might have seen my name on the email and part of my job is to help facilitate trainings like these to help Nebraska businesses get the information that they need to grow and thrive so we are glad to have all of you on this free third Thursday training we do have them every month on different topics so if you enjoy this call I recommend that you check out our upcoming trainings as they arise I am going to ask that if you can please mute your phone to kind of prevent background noise and just unmute if you need to turn in to ask a question trainings like these would not be possible without the generous support of our donors and our sponsors and we do like keeping these free and open to the public so I want to give a big shout out today to our sponsor Great Plains communication so without their help trainings like these would not be possible and now the reason we're all here today we have michelle from method development and she is going to be talking to us about ways to keep your website fresh fast and friendly I'm Michelle let you take it away all right thanks Heidi I just want to say thank you to Heidi and Janelle for inviting me to speak at this opportunity and to talk with you all today first I'll tell you a little bit about myself I am a co-owner of method development with my husband Jason we specialize in custom software and website solutions for small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits we're located in the Omaha area so if you're ever here you can visit us we also have several software products that have customers nationwide including a web Hornet which is basically a website editor and a a file share system called burner link I have a background in technical project management and front-end web development been doing this i graduated college back in 96 so a long time now and our company is almost 12 years old so we're excited to celebrate that coming up pretty quick here in March I have a daughter who I love very much and one of my other passions aside from technology is the contouring so just a little side fact about me so today we're going to be covering quite a few different topics here but the importance of keeping your website fresh some website trends that we're seeing in the industry and have been helping make happen for customers making your website a tool and also the importance of a good relationship with your software or website vendor so let's get started first let's talk about the importance of keeping your site fry so that will be like the second slide if you the document that you have in front of you now I want to make sure you think about your website as the front door to your business you would not let your front store display products that you don't sell or you don't offer and you don't want to have information up on your website same way that you no longer offer or is not you know you don't want on display for customers to see now more than ever people will research your business online before coming to your storefront so they'll look for you online and if your website is not fresh you'll be showing people false information if you want to keep that updated another reason that you want to keep your website updated is search engines love new content and they love original content search engines crawl the web there's programs called spiders and bots that crawl the web looking at websites to see different websites and index those websites if your website is outdated and your content has not changed in a long time on your website there's no reason for that that search engine to dig deeper into your website and rank you higher so I know a lot of you probably have questions on how do I get ranked higher well one big key factor there is to change your content from time to time and do things like blogging so you want to talk about things related to your industry and that's a major reason to keep your website fresh so you get found by search engines so change your content blog and freshen it up now not only do you want searches is coming to your site but you also want customers coming back to your site so if you don't change your website you're not really giving your customers or reason to come back to your website so make sure you do that again by you know updating pictures on your website updating content updating maybe news and happenings in your industry one of the things that we really like to do on you know our different sites is talk about unique things in the industry that we're encountering it's possibly like customers ask us a question and then we'll talk about it one of our developers likes to blog on different topics in the developing world and it really attracts attention to our sites and we get more traffic coming back if you're using social media twitter facebook and such a great thing to do is basically put some content on your website and then link to that content from your social media sites you don't really want to use your social media sites as your main website you want to have a website of your own and keep driving traffic back to your site and remember that your website is your 24 x 7 by 365 sales rep so keep it fresh keep it new people or people are looking at that site and of course one other reason to keep your site fresh is your competition is doing it they're updating their websites so you need to do the same thing and we like to say proof of life so if your site is never changing you're not really proving that you're around you're just stale so proof of life make sure it's updated so moving on some trends that we've been seeing and been helping our customers with one of them is kind of been around now for a while but it's really important is so smart phones and tablet usage are continuing to grow people search and make decisions while they're on those devices and I bet many of you have a smartphone or tablet sitting right next to you so even even I kind of did some research and back in 2015 amazon with seeing almost seventy percent of holiday customers using mobile devices to shop so if you're just getting started on your website i highly encourage that you consider a responsive website or a mobile version of your website and if you have not if you have a website already and you haven't converted yet I highly recommend that you consider converting to a responsive website now what are the difference between responses and a mobile version of the website is responsive websites will resize it's one website that will resize to the different devices tablet to a mobile device and then back to a normal PC whereas a mobile version of your website you have one version that's your normal large website that fits well on a PC and then you have another version that is slim down for your mobile device then you have to maintain two websites so we really recommend they're going the responsive route now this is an investment for businesses but it's just highly recommendable recommendable because of a couple things Google may penalize you in your search rank if you don't have a mobile-friendly website so that's really something to consider when you're trying to reach audiences you may not be ranked as high because your site isn't mobile friendly and also google says that 61 percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site if they're having trouble with that site or trouble accessing it and then you know forty percent of those people then go ahead and visit a competitor site instead so it's really really something to think about there not only to have a mobile site but then also to test it on your devices so go ahead and try your mobile you know try your website on your mobile device or on your tablet another thing if you're just starting out or if you have what's called flash I would recommend you get away from any flash websites they don't really work well on mobile devices moving on another trend that we're seeing in website design is high quality graphics the days of tiny pictures and really dated backgrounds are kind of over if your site hasn't been revamped for several years you may really want to rethink your graphics so you'll go to a site nowadays and the whole background will be a beautiful high-quality photo it really helps enhance enhance the website experience and bring it to life the great thing is that stock photo is very affordable and it's easy to purchase there's lots of variety when you go search some stock photo sites there's lots of different sizes and it's typically about between ten to twenty dollars per photo depending on what you're looking for another route and I think even better yet is we like to take tell businesses that we work with to take their own photos or hire a professional photographer to snap some shots of your place of work or your staff doing day-to-day work so that's some great options for you I did include there some links to some stock and free photography sites original photography is great that's another real big trend actually some people are even sayin get away from the stock photo move to what's called original or authentic photography more natural so just something for you to think about for your site and I know one of the questions that we had come through I think it was from Sandra is ways to improve you know the look and give your site a website a pop you can really do that with large graphics that can span the entire site now of course you want to make sure that those photos make sense to what you're talking about about your topic so do make sure to research those photos imagery can of course make an emotional connection to your customer so you want to take that into consideration so any questions on that so far ok Oh keep moving all right another the next item I want to kind of cover is simple web design simple web design so if you're just starting out or looking to kind of redo your website we always say simple is kind of better simple web design makes for a better what's called user experience aux clutter is not necessarily attractive to the human eye so try to use white space when you can keep things faced out but you still want to give visitors enough information so that they want to click or to buy or to act or to read more contents important so we always know that but you don't have to for example clutter your homepage with too much content something I always like to recommend is kind of the power of three come up with three value propositions for your business and say what do I want to do I you know what are the services or the features that are attractive to customers and come up with those three things they could be products they could be services they could be you know anything that you really want to feature on your website and then come up with like three icons or three graphics that represent that and show those three maybe on the homepage and allow people to really drill in and find out more about those products or services because visitors will dig in okay so they'll drive in and they will they will click click to read more if they're interested another thing is a well-designed navigation you really want to think about your navigation and you know it it allows your visitors to rapidly access information about your company so make it easy for visitors to find what they're looking for nothing's worse than not being able to find a contact button or contact link to try to contact somebody alright alright another trend that is important to on a good website to have is a call to action so once that visitor is on your site you want to use buttons and forms and other website features to call out to that visitor to bank action so an example here is I've got a contact button or if you see that on the on the document but you can't take big buttons and put them like stings editor and hyperlink those buttons so that a person can click on those and either get to your contact page or even call you directly from your website a lot of times people will even drop the phone number in the button so you can see the phone number or click if you're on a mobile device another to action kind of element of a website is adding lead collection forms so we recommend gathering you know information on potential customers with small simple lead collection forms and I have example up there to stay updated with for example digital marketing so that'd be like a marketing newsletter and you get the name and the email of somebody visiting your website and now that's a lead for you to do future marketing to you could also if you're having a product that you could do a sample of you can do you know I a free sample and get some contact information so you can send out your free sample or a register for a free trial of you know a product or service you're offering so it's good way to just call / into action and say sign up now for our for whose letter or sign up for our service other ways of course as we all know our e-commerce buying out and order online so once you've got the customer there you want them what to do your websites for you 24 by 7 so for that all to action okay I'm trend and if you've not seen it i'm sure most of you have is adding video to your website not all who do you want to tell your visitors about products and services but you also want to show them with video so a show can short videos products and services it's a great way to gauge your visitors and and you can really put different places of your fight we've had customers at clients those short videos to home page site that might showcase their building order your penis the pest clients have had videos up here in there to show how a past event went and how on it I have several customers who like to do videos and both and that's actually a really great one because you are the expert in your industry you and your staff so if you can take a video of you talking a better product service not only you know are you you telling some of the about project but you're coming your personality and your you're showing yourself off and you're showing your expertise so just people really connect with video now ways to get that into your website once you take a video it's so much easier now with with the smartphones but you can have your website vendor host that video and integrate it into your website or what I think is kind of a better option is you can take your video and put it up on YouTube or any other type of video hosting site and then embed that video into your site using code provided by the video host it's very simple to do and one thing I like about for example YouTube there are a major search engines a lot of businesses don't so it's true that may be putting up on YouTube and then if somebody is serving for your product and service not only is it on your website but I thought they want youtube so you kind of are hit into things there alright any questions so far okay so just a couple of other items I had a couple of other pages in that PDF document that just talked about some ways to kind of add some modern design elements to your site so here are a few suggestions for that now custom fonts if you don't like a boring standard font that most sites use like Ariel some of the other standard ones it's really easy to display custom fonts on your site without needing the user to actually have to download and install those bonds so there's ways to do that in the web world now you may need a developer to do that but that's something that you could easily ask your developer to do just to kind of snow as up your side a little bit and there's a variety of modern fonts that are available to you today okay another thing we like to kind of use occasionally depending on our client is kind of add bright color or different gradients to their site it adds a little bit of personality to your site and it's really pleasing to the eye and it can stand out now of course it doesn't work for all companies but you know if you kind of have a want to show off just a little different personality it's a little bit unique from from the majority of sites out there another trend that we're seeing in design is called card design and grid layout card de ign and grid layout is really great for organizing content and some companies now when you go to their website instead of having a standard navigation of across the top they're using these larger graphics or icons with a word or two underneath them and then the click and then you drill in for more now you know doesn't work for all businesses but it's just kind of a design that's kind of trendy right now so just kind of organizes content a little bit of different way and it lets you explore the website a little differently so now I'm going to jump into if there's no questions jump into talking about making your website a tool we've kind of hit upon this already talking about call to action and lead generation forms so that you can do that with online forms and data collection forms contact us other ways we've had customers do this is employment forms scholarship forms all any kind of way that you need to collect data from from a user and you can think of that both in lead collection but also just if you need to collect more data from even your customers that are coming to your website and you more information to help help your business process flows work we can build most developers can build forms and a lot of website tools offer that as well another thing you can add to your website is a calendar of events so if your organization puts on a lot of events you can add event challengers to your site with details and then not only have the events listed but do event registration now another thing I want to talk about is a blog or a news area so if you're listening in today and you're thinking a lot about how do i get my website found on the search engines this is one of the areas that we kind of key in with our customers we always say content is king and while you may not always feel like you have something to talk about on your blog you should really try to blog you know we always say minimum once a month we're happy though if our customers even get out and blog at once a quarter or so but this is a great way for not only search engines but customers to come back to your website and look and see what you've been talking about and what's going on in your industry so a lot of times we recommend a company's to take a question that has come in to your organization and write about it and just talk a little bit about it search engines and cuss and people are always searching for content on questions that they can't find answers to so you know then potentially your website could rank higher on that particular topic and when you blog we say just use natural wording that you would use when you're talking to just anybody and let those words and phrases kind of turn into what people are searching on so you want it to kind of be natural flowing talk when you're blogging but we do recommend to try to do that if you can do it more than once a month great do it as often as you'd like but I know everybody who's a small business and it's difficult to do but we say you know try to make the effort to do that or have one of your staff members do that another fun tool to add to your website is a gallery of photos this kind of shows the personality of your company so we recommend you know putting photos up and it gives a reason for your staff and for you know people to come back and see who you are and see what your company is all about another tool that we have a lot of customers come and talk to us about is private pages or the ability for members or their customers to log in to a back-end and be able to access things that the general public could not access so this is where you're really taking that next step from going from a website that people can you know just just look at and browse to using it more as a tool where now you've got a login and password for people to access a whole back-end set of maybe documents maybe it's additional forms maybe its invoices for your customers so you can have your website do those types of things of course that does require programming but what that can do is depending on what you want to use that for is it can save you time and management on your you know for your business so that you're actually your members are logging in and doing activities that you would normally have to do yourself so it's it's an interesting thing to start thinking about for your business now other ways of course to make your website a tool is to take that step into e-commerce now if you're new and just starting out and you have a product to sell and you don't really want to invest in some large shopping cart we often say try paypal or a third party type of shopping cart that you can still either link off to so a person on your website and then they may be directed to a separate shopping cart to do that part or you can have PayPal buttons within your website to for people to click on and to make payments to now where that saves you money is that you're not paying you know for the full shopping cart necessarily all of the processing fees there are fees attached so you'd have to check those out depending on which which products you go with but that is a little bit less expensive than going with a full-blown shopping cart now if you want to make yourself real quick quick question would you recommend that like having your shopping cart on your website above using like a platform like Shopify or BigCommerce and just redirecting there I think you know if you're probably a organization that is really dependent on you know you're selling products and services and and you really need the power and you have the budget I would go with probably Shopify or one of those larger carts because the other thing that some of those larger carts can do is they can integrate better with Google Analytics so you may want to consider that when you're when you're looking at a shopping cart product now paypal like when we integrate paypal buttons into websites it's not always as pretty as having you know a more customizable cart so the buttons aren't really beautiful the process isn't very streamlined so you'll go from your website and then the person will click on the paypal button to add to cart and then when they go to check out there actually driven to a paypal website now they come back to your website but it's not real seamless to the user so those are some things to think about did that help answer the question yes thank you great so as I think that was Heidi who was asking you know there are so many great shopping cart programs out there or services that offer that Shopify as a good one so definitely you know if you decide you can search those things online and try to find a service that will do shopping cards and websites for you online or you can work with the vendor like us and we can try to help you make that decision as well once some things that you do with any of this kind of the things that I'm talking about on this area is on any online payments or accepting payments you do have to be mindful of having a secure website for e-commerce and for payments online because you're working you're accepting credit card information which is very sensitive and you want to make sure that your website is secure and that it's PCI compliant so that you know in that case you do want to make sure that you're working with somebody who kind of understands that realm if you don't understand it some other ways that we make the website to a tool is you can set up ways for online payments for events for example so we've integrated some of that within memberships online registration and event registration and then also accepting invoice payments kind of anything that you if you need to generate revenue from your website accepting credit card payments you can use your website to do that alright and then kind of if you're following along with the slides the next one related to making your website a tool this is the area that I really specialized and it is going into different businesses and learning about their business workflows and business processes to see how we can take their website to the next level and smooth out some of those processes using a website so for example will comment into a business and find out that they are keying in data for you know any particular type of thing and collecting data and that data needs to be stored let's say they're typing it into an Excel worksheet so we can take that and change it into an online form that only they have access to and then that data is captured into a database and then we produce reports for them and it can be possible that one thing is you kind of see in the diagram that I show maybe you capture data which leads to another form of capturing data which leads to a process being kicked off and something maybe an email gets sent out so that all requires coding but can be done within website software so it's just a bigger way of thinking about your business and saying hey do I need some software to make my business processes flow more smoothly so some examples too we've done databases of members databases of clients and employees we for example I've done medical applications and membership applications customer relationship managers so you and and people have moved from having desktop applications to actually having their website do all those tools so there are a lot of businesses that are actually dependent on their website too just for their business to run another thing that we do is store and allow our clients to access documents as well so kind of anything you can dream up we tend to try to build in software fun business to be in alright any questions on that so the last topic I kind of wanted to hit upon today with selecting website software vendor and the importance of that relationship so if you're kind of starting out or you're looking to switch over to a vendor here's just some things that I I know I would think about if I had to you know choose a vendor and I like to tell my customers about these things as well so not only do you want to get an idea of the services that your vendor provides but I often like to say hey we don't provide these types of services that are kind of associated so it's good to know that because while you may think that your website vendor is going to do your website and run your email and do all your marketing for you that's not necessarily true so you need to find out what services they provide and maybe what associated services they do not provide then I also say ask for website samples and work samples of work and references most vendors can give you samples of websites they work on even references to contact so it's a good idea to do to ask for that I also recommend understanding the prot of the pricing for development and ongoing support so it's just a good thing to ask up front and if you know what you're looking for you can even ask for an estimate on the website that you're trying to build or the software you're trying to build now extensive software is difficult to estimate but you can certainly try to get an estimate for that most general websites you can get an estimate for pretty easily you'll also want to know about this is pretty important about the ongoing customer support so once you have that person or have that company as a vendor a website vendor what kind of support do they offer going going forward do they just set you up and you can't really reach out to them and get help a lot of products out there let's say you decided you wanted to go with Go Daddy's website service so you could put up a website there but it's difficult often to get ahold of them for assistance on moving your domain or helping with problems you have related to your website so you want to check that out ahead of time and know that you can get hold of that vendor phone and email if you need to and Melanie can you like a quick point about maybe the price difference in if you're having them make the updates to your website or if you're updating the content yourself Michelle sorry I'm sorry what was the question I'm sorry could you talk just a little bit about the difference between if you're having your the person you're working with update the content on your website or if you're updating at yourself right so how it works is when you hire a vendor what you do want to understand is is your website in a product or in a platform and this is one of the questions kind of a little further down that sheet but what platform is the vendor using so there's a product called WordPress and there are many other development platforms ours is actually called web Hornet where you can go in yourself and update your website so you'll want to know if there's such a product especially if you like to do those things if you're comfortable around tech and you can log in and do that but what you'll also want to know is does your vendor provide the service of actually going in and making the changes for you so for example we have customers in our web hornet platform where they can log into the site and change and update their content on their website but if they don't want to mess it around with it all they have to do is email or call us and we'll make the changes for them so you will want to check with your vendor if they offer that service to do the updates for you and the pricing on that with that updates typically cost another thing is getting an idea the turnaround time what how long do updates take are they usually simple text changes are they done within 24 hours can you get in and do it or if it's a bigger change how long do those typically take and another thing that I always like to do are like to think about is I like to think that we talk and pretty non tech talk and my representatives my employees who work in on our web hornet product we really try to have them talk non tech talk to our customers so that they don't have to understand all of the tech jargon so you know I think it's important to find at least a vendor that you can relate with and why you know why do you want to have such a good relationship with your vendor that's kind of my last topic I want to hit but it's really important I mean just like probably any any 0 service that you need ongoing you will need a good relationship with your vendor because you do need to visit with them regularly on your website and you want to make it a point to meet or to contact them once in a while to go over and to communicate with them your needs so I think it's good to do a meeting at minimum once a year with them if you can do it more often quarterly great so visit with them and communicate with your needs their needs sometimes your vendor will send out recommendations to you but it's good to ask them for recommendations so they don't you know necessarily know what you're looking for but ask for recommendations and they can always take a peek at your website and see where you need to make updates and then I think it's good for your vendor to also experience your products and your services possibly your place of work and understand your workflow because they can always help to you know say hey we could add this to your website and this could help out maybe we could add a map to your website and then people could find out where your location is or maybe we could add a new form for data collection to collect name and phone number and some other pieces of information that you need in your day-to-day work flow so there we go so that's my discussion and I just want to offer up if we have any questions I know there's some questions to go over but if anybody does have questions you're all welcome to contact me my information is at the end of the PDF presentation and i'll be emailing a fellow captain call as well Heidi did we want to go through any of these questions yeah let's let's pull them up here I know we had a fair few just about getting started would you recommend they talk to you or would you recommend a we're researching vendors to get started or what would you quite a very versatile really it's it's kind of what they're comfortable with typically what I say is try to get a little bit organized before you you know before you just dive right in and to build a website but they can certainly talk to me that's that's no problem feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email but some of the hings that I recommend when you start thinking of putting a website together is think about your website URL and web address what you'd like usually it's kind of something related to your business name then start creating what's called a site map which is a list of pages that you'd like to see on your website and those pages of course will be full filled with content and photos so you'll want to start organizing a little bit your content your and your photography and then another important thing that you can think at during this process is your goal for your website are you trying to get people to just call you for your product or service are you trying to get them to buy online because you might need a different vendor to do you know a shopping cart versus just a general website to have a contact form or such and you know if you don't want to do all that yourself you just contact a company like ours and we can help you through this process but certainly don't get bogged down too much with the content in the pages we always say try to get something up and going for your website and you can always add as you go and other platforms that you are creating their own website other platforms you recommend stayin away from simply need to be mobile and tablet friendly well i think you know you can there's a lot of different platforms out there so it's kind of hard to say you know one's really better than that and we kind of try to stay out of that what we call the holy war of what platform is better but certainly do research on your on your platform that you're looking at a lot of the bigger ones like wordpress for example ours we we build everything now we do ours in our web hornet platform everything is mobile friendly so you have your website that resizes down to mobile friendly a lot of people learn WordPress you can go that direction and they have mobile-friendly templates the things that you kind of do want to be aware of and when you asked about platforms is is this an open source platform like wordpress or like ours is not an open source so that means that not just any developers can contribute to that platform and we did that for a reason so for example WordPress is open which means you can go in and start installing plugins but you don't know what will happen to those and it could potentially lead to some risk of your website now if you have a good developer who's worked on with WordPress and knows WordPress they know typically which plugins to stay away from but we have chosen and other companies have as well to build our own platform that is locked down so it's not so easily hackable and we roll out updates regularly for our customers so that if there is any type of flaw in the system we roll a doubt we fix it they don't have to worry about that themselves ok then Michelle this is norm hi norm hi are your company is your company a company where I say for example I can come in shut down and kind of interview with you and share with you what my company is all about and what I would like to see and then you can give me some information about how to go about developing a website sure definitely are you are you located number one we are we've actually just moved completely virtual so we'd pick an office space to go to we come to you or we'd set up a meeting space for that but yes we could certainly do that for you because I'm a almost like a one one person shop and I would love to have a website but I don't want to spend time team in as little time as I possibly can talk yeah on the website Islanders spend time on my products and stuff right and we're seeing more and more of that for a while there was a trend where everybody wanted to build their own website but i think a lot more people are saying hey I need to get back to my products and services and polish those and I don't have time to do this well it takes a lot more than what people think to build a website so so certainly we can assist with that so I can get in touch with you on with this number on on the Britney out of the PDF document okay sounds good any other questions well Michelle thank you so much for all this wonderful information yeah and yeah and I will be funny metric contact information after the call in case anybody has follow-up questions for you or like yours I'd like to contact you and Sam one-on-one i'm also going to be sending out a quick survey i would like to ask everybody on the call so that out just letting us know what you thought about the training and is there any topics that you're interested in hearing about in the future and I'd also like to invite everybody on the call if you want to learn more about marketing your technology tools we do have our market tech conference coming up on mark 16 in Kearney Nebraska we're going to bring in a lot of good names weaker and you can learn more about that at market kick conference org so thank you all again for enemies okay and I hope you all have a wonderful day tiny thank you I