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On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Anne Stefanyk on the show to discuss website optimization. As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs, and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions. Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp.
In this episode, we discuss:
-Why your website is one of your most important marketing tools
-The art of simplicity in branding
-How to track the customer lifecycle
-The top tools you need to upgrade your website
-And so much more!
Resources:
Use user research to get insight into audience behavior
How to make your site last 5 years (possibly more)
A big thank you to Net Health for sponsoring this episode! Learn more about the Redoc Patient Portal here.
For more information on Anne:
As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions.
Anne fell into the Drupal community in 2007 and admired both the community’s people and the constant quest for knowledge. After holding Director-level positions at large Drupal agencies, she decided she was ready to open Kanopi Studios in 2013.
Her background is in business development, marketing, and technology, which allows her to successfully manage all facets of the business as well as provide the technical understanding to allow her to interface with engineers. She has accumulated years of professional Drupal hands-on experience, from basic websites to large Drupal applications with high-performance demands, multiple integrations, complicated migrations, and e-commerce including subscription and multi-tenancy.
Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.
Read the full transcript below:
Karen Litzy (00:01):
Hey Anne, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited and happy to have you on.
Anne Stefanyk (00:06):
Nice to see you. Thank you so much for having me.
Karen Litzy (00:09):
So before we get into what we’re going to talk about today, which is kind of how to use your website as a marketing tool, and that’s putting it lightly, we’re going to really dive into that, but I want to talk about kanopi. So for a lot of my listeners, they know that I’m a huge proponent of female entrepreneurs of women in physical therapy. We have a whole conference for it every year. And I love the fact that kanopi is a majority female company. So can you talk about the inception and kind of the journey that you’ve taken with the company over the years?
Anne Stefanyk (00:47):
Sure, I’d be happy to. So I founded kanopi kind of off the side of my desk and it actually came from meeting a need that I needed to take care of with my family. My family became quite sick and I had to stop working and as a result it forced my hand to pick up some contract work. And that contract works. Certain cuts soon kind of snowballed into, Oh my goodness, I have actual projects. I probably should hire some people and get out of my personal email to run the business. But it did come from a place where I needed some lifestyle flexibility. So I built a company that is fully distributed as well. And as a result of the business model that we created, it allowed us to really attract and retain really great talent. Outside of major cities. And I have a lot of single moms or a lot of moms and I have some single dads too, but we really are able to, with our business model, attract and retain a lot of top talent.
Anne Stefanyk (01:39):
And a lot of those are girls. So we’re over 50% women and there’s only really two men in our leadership, a team of nine. So there’s seven girl bosses out of the nine that run the company. And we really have focused on helping people with their websites and making it really clear and simple and easy to understand. We find that there’s always too much jargon out there. There’s too much complexity and that we all are just craving simplicity. So building the business was twofold, was one to obviously help people with their websites. What was also to really create impactful futures for my staff and give them opportunities to kind of grow and expand in new ways. So I’m really proud that as kanopi has formed our team, I’m part of our retention plan has to really been to take care of our families and put our families first.
Anne Stefanyk (02:28):
Because if we realize that if you take care of the family, the family takes care of you. And so we’ve extended a lot of different benefits to be able to support the family journey as part of the business. And we find that as a female entrepreneur, really recognizing and appreciating that we need flexible lifestyles to be able to rear children or take care of elderly parents or we have a lot of demands as females on us. I mean the men do too, don’t get me wrong, but as a female I’m creating a space of work where we can create that space for everybody really makes me proud. And happy.
Karen Litzy (03:03):
Yeah, I mean it’s just in going through the website and reading about it, I was just like, Oh gosh, this woman’s amazing. Like what a great way to go to work every day. Kind of knowing that you’re staying true to what your values are and your mission is and that people really seem to like it.
Anne Stefanyk (03:22):
Yeah. Yeah. We always say it’s not B to B or B to C, it’s H to H it’s human to human. And what do we need to get really clear to speak to our humans to help them, you know, move forward in their journey, whatever that looks like for them.
Karen Litzy (03:34):
Right. And, so now let’s talk about that journey and it’s kind of starts with the website. So let’s talk about how you can make your website an effective marketing tool. Because not everyone, especially when you’re first starting out, you don’t have a lot of money to throw around to advertising and things like that. But we all have a website or maybe we all should have a website and have some sort of web presence. So how can we make that work for us?
Anne Stefanyk (04:00):
Yeah, definitely. You need a website. It’s like a non negotiable factor these days and it really doesn’t matter. The kind of website you have, especially when you’re just getting started. There’s lots of great tools out there from Wix, Squarespace, even WordPress that comes with templates or pre-baked themes. And I think the most important part is to really connect with your user and figure out who your user is and what kind of website needs to support their journey. But yeah, definitely you have to have a website and you actually have to have a good website. Having a bad website is the non, like, it’s really bad because it will detract people so quickly and they’ll never come back. So you pretty much have that first impression. And then if you don’t make it, they won’t come back. I think there’s a well known stamp that if your site doesn’t load within four seconds or three seconds they’ll leave. And if it doesn’t load within four seconds, they will never come back to that URL.
Karen Litzy (04:56):
Wow. All right. That’s a great stat. I’m going to be, I’m going to go onto my computer, onto my website and start my timer, you know, so there’s some really cool tools.
Anne Stefanyk (05:06):
We can include them in the show notes, but the Google has a page speed test where you can actually put your website URL and see how fast it is and give recommendations on what to fix.
Karen Litzy (05:15):
Oh perfect. Yeah, and we’ll put all those links in the website and we’ll get to that in a little bit about those different kinds of tools. But let’s talk about, you said, you know, you’re human to human business. We have to know who are we putting our website out there for. So how do we do that?
Anne Stefanyk (05:34):
Yeah, that’s a great question. So when you’re first starting off, you probably all like if you’re just starting your business, you’re just trying to figure out who you serve, but you may have special things that you’d like to, you know, that you’re passionate about or you specialize in. Like for example, maybe you really specialize in women’s health or sports medicine or you know, one of those things. And just to kind of get clear on who is your best customer. If you’ve been in business for a couple of years, you probably have a pretty good idea who your ideal customer is and how they engage with you. So first off, it’s really thinking about who your target audience is and what are their needs. So when we’re thinking about a website and thinking about that user journey, you often identify them as certain people. So you may have like, Mmm you know, kind of creating different avatars or different personas so you can really personify these people and help understand their journey.
Anne Stefanyk (06:27):
And from there you kind of understand that if someone’s coming to you for physical therapy, there’s going to be different mind States that they come into you with. So when you first have your website, you’re going to want to, of course, a lot of people just put up who they are. Like, you know, this is my practice, this is who I am. This is my credit, my accreditation, and my certifications. And maybe maybe here’s some testimonials. And then we run and we go off to the races. And that’s great to get you out the door. Once you started your business, you’re going to recognize that you’re people, when they call you, they’re going to have a million questions and there’s ways to answer those questions using your website. And as a solo entrepreneur, like I ran my business by myself for three years, which means I was everything and I wore all the hats.
Anne Stefanyk (07:09):
I was the project manager, I was the designer, I was all the things that was the marketer, was the, I know that feeling well. So it took me like three years to operationalize. And I think the first thing I did as a female entrepreneur, I hired an assistant. I would highly recommend that as being one of your first hires as an entrepreneur. And that’s just someone who can do all the little itty bitty details and then move on to whatever that looks like for you. But when you’re building your website, the next level you really need to take is it serving my humans? Is it serving my audience? So are they able to get the information they need? And I think this strange time that we’re in, we’re all, this is an opportunity for us to look at our own website and our own stuff and say, is this the best representation possible?
Anne Stefanyk (07:52):
Because no longer are they just picking up the phone and calling you because your practice is probably closed. You’re at home right now, your phones, maybe you if you have them redirected, but either way they’re going to your website first. So it’s like having the right information there at the right time for the right person. And that really comes to the user journey and that’s where you know, if someone is just broken their ankle and they’re now told by their doctor, you have to go into physical therapy, that’s their first stage as they now are going to Google and saying, you know, PT for San Francisco and interestingly enough as Google wants to keep you there, so here you are. You user is Googling for you or Googling for physical therapy wherever, San Francisco, San Jose, wherever, and up comes the Google listings. If you can get past that point, then they go into your website and they’re going to click open a bunch of them.
Anne Stefanyk (08:43):
That’s what we call, you know, your awareness phase. They’re becoming aware of you. There’s certain things that a user wants to see in that phase. So understanding of someone’s looking for you, they’re going to, Oh yeah, they specialize in ankles. And I really think you know, Oh, that’s person’s for me. Versus now they’re in the consideration stage and now they’ve chose likely, but Sally over here and James and Jimmy and we’re figuring out which PT to go to, then that’s a different level of content and what are they looking at to compare and contrast. And then when they’ve actually decided to work with you, then there’s another layer of content you have to consider. So, Oh, I’ve decided to work where they’re located. How do I get there? Was there anything I need to prepare their forms I need to fill out in advance?
Anne Stefanyk (09:27):
And then you even have the persona of the user once they’ve actually gone through all your services as I imagine. And therapy. A lot of you folks are getting referral and word of mouth. Let’s nurture that. Let’s use the website to nurture the word of mouth and referral work. Let’s give your patients a place to go really easily to provide feedback, which will then change, you know, getting those Google reviews up leads to a higher ranking on that Google page. So if you understand where they began and where they pop out at the end, kind of map it all together. You’ll start to see your gaps.
Karen Litzy:
And is it possible to go through sort of a quick example of what that might look like? So if someone’s there on Google, they hit Google, they click on your website, you just said if it doesn’t load within a couple of seconds, they’re gone.
Anne Stefanyk (10:14):
Right? So that’s a good awareness phase situation, right? What else? Someone’s there, they’re just click, click, click trying to find someone. What is it that they’re looking for in that awareness stage? Like what are they, what is going to be like, Ooh, I like this, this person. I’m moving them from the awareness bucket to the consideration bucket. Yeah, yeah. So they need to see themselves in the way that their problem gets solved. So when they look at the website, they can say, Oh yeah, that person had the same problem and they got help. And then, Oh, look at their results. Oh look, there’s a picture of them, you know, back on their skateboard six months later as part of this patient follow-up log. Oh, we don’t, you know. So that’s the kind of stuff is that when users really want to just be able to see themselves, they crave simplicity.
Anne Stefanyk (11:01):
And so often I think that if we’re too close to it, we don’t actually see how complex our stuff is. And sometimes when we’re really smart and we have degrees in specialized things, we use vocabulary that our users are not even aware of yet. So it’s really when you’re talking to getting them from that awareness into considering you, it’s about using really basic common language. It’s about guiding them through a bit of a story. People love to read stories. So showing them like, Oh, you know, I was really showing another patient and showing the patient journey that all, I considered multiple companies locally, but I ultimately went with Sally as a PT because this, and just showing those things helps the user kind of see the whole journey so they can say, okay, okay, if you’ve never broken your ankle before, have no idea what to expect. You’ve never gone to physical therapy, you have no idea what to expect. And just the anticipation, if you can show them what snacks they feel a sense of relief that they’ll be taken care of.
Karen Litzy (12:04):
Yeah. So what I’m hearing is that your testimonial page on your website’s pretty important, is that something that should be front and center on the homepage?
Anne Stefanyk (12:16):
Well, that’s an interesting thing. I think the main thing you want to use that front and center is being really clear about what you do. Right? Some people like to put these big sentences up there, but getting to know your user and the problem they have and this, you know, getting to how you’re going to solve the problem is the most important part of that, of that real estate upfront. I will warn everybody that please don’t use carousels. They’re a big fad and they’re just a fad. They’re from a usability standpoint. And what happens is the end user thinks that whatever you put in your carousel is what you do. So if you’re promoting an event in your carousel, they’ll think that you’re just doing the events.
Anne Stefanyk (13:01):
They won’t even know that you’re a physical therapist. Really clear upfront about what you do. You know, like I help people with, you know, however it goes, and then provide supporting content. So a testimonial is wonderful if it can also be like imbedded within a bigger story. So it tells the full story. I like that video. I mean everybody has an iPhone. So, or at least access to video really easily. You could do a quick little video testimonial with one of your clients over zoom for two minutes to say, Hey, you’re one of my favorite PT clients and can you get on a quick video with me and just do a video testimonial. That’s great way to leverage video content on your website to help the user see themselves as what the solution’s going to be.
Karen Litzy (13:47):
Yeah. Great, great, awesome. And then one stipulation I would say on that is talk to your lawyer because you’ll need them to sign a release for HIPAA purposes, right? To make sure that they know exactly where this video is going to be. You have to be very clear on that. Okay, great. So we’re out of the awareness phase, so we’re in consideration. So let’s say it’s between me and one other PT in New York city. What should I be looking at on my website to get that person from consideration to yes.
Anne Stefanyk (14:20):
So one of the greatest ways to do stuff is actually a very tried and it’s email marketing or text-based marketing. So if you can capture an email during that awareness phase, even if it’s just like you know, Mmm. Interested in getting some tips and tricks on how to rejuvenate your bone health during, you know, it doesn’t have to be like sign up for a newsletter or sign up for this. It could be just a very simple, if you know your user is coming there specifically for a thing and you can provide some type of value added content, then there might be some small way to get a snippet of data so that you can continue the conversation. Cause most people are just bombarded with information and overwhelmed. So if there’s any way to connect with them so you can feed them information. But another great way to kind of pull them into that consideration content is once you’ve got their eyeballs hooked and you’re in, there is again to kind of figure out what are the common things, questions they need to have, they have answers they need answers to.
Anne Stefanyk (15:22):
And this might be from your experience, just answering phone calls when people are starting to talk to you. But it’s like the questions like you know, maybe how long does it take for me to heal, you know, will I have different types of medicine I’m going to have to take? How much homework will there be? Do I need any special equipment? That’s kind of, you know, just showing that you’re the expert in the field and you have the answers to questions they didn’t even know they had to ask. That kind of aha moment makes them feel really trusted. They trust you because they go, Oh I didn’t even think about asking that question. Oh my goodness, I’m so glad they thought about that. I feel so taken care of. And that’s where I think a lot of websites drop the ball is they straight up say like this is what we do, here’s some testimonials. And they don’t put all that soft content and that builds the trust. Can be a little blog, a little FAQ section and this is all like non technical stuff. You don’t need a developer to do any of this. It’s mostly just your writing time.
Karen Litzy (16:18):
Yeah, no and it’s making me go through my head of my FAQ, so I’m like, Hmm, maybe I need to revisit. That’s the one page I just sort of did a revamp of my website. We were talking about this before we went on, but I actually did not go to my FAQ page cause I thought to myself, Oh, it’s probably good. It’s probably not. I need to go back and do a little revamp on that too, just to think about some of the questions that I’ve been getting from patients recently and how does this work and things like that. Especially now with COVID. You know, like what about tele-health? What about this or about that?
Anne Stefanyk (16:51):
Yeah. Google loves when you update your content. Google loves it. Google loves it so much. It is one of the biggest disservices you can do is build your website and leave it. That’s just not healthy. People think you have to rebuild your website every two to three years. That’s who we are. That’s bananas. You have to do it. If you just take care of your website and you nurture it and you love it and you make it, you make it work and you continually work on it and maybe that’s just an hour a week, maybe it’s an hour every month, whatever it is. Just a little bit of attention really goes a long way and it is something that we believe a website should last for at least 10 years, but that means you got to take care of it, right. A lot of clients come to me and say, Oh well, you know we’re going to have to rebuild this in three years, and I’m like, no, you shouldn’t.
Anne Stefanyk (17:31):
It should be totally fine. It’s just like if you get a house right, if you don’t do anything with your house a hundred years later, it’s probably demolished. Like you’re going to tear it down versus you’ve got to do the roof and you’ve got to replace the carpets and you got to do the perimeter drain. Right. It’s kind of the website stuff too. I mean, Google will throw you curve balls if you’re spending a lot time on social. Unless you’re getting direct business from social media, don’t worry about it so much. Google has changed their algorithms, which means that social doesn’t count for as much as it did. Oh, so if you’re spending two or three hours a week scheduling social, unless you’re directly getting benefit, like from direct users, finding one social tone that way down and spend more time writing blogs, spending more time getting you know content on your website is, that’s what matters from a Google standpoint.
Karen Litzy (18:16):
Good to know. Gosh, this is great. So all right, the person has now moved from consideration. They said, yes, I’m going to go and see Karen. This is what I’ve decided. Awesome. So now how can I make their patient journey a little bit easier?
Anne Stefanyk:
So we started at Google, they got from awareness to consideration. They said yes. Now what? Yeah, now what? So it’s continuing the conversation and creating kind of being ahead of them. So text messages, 99% of text messages are open and read. Okay. Yeah, I think it’s like 13 to 20% of emails are open read. So it would be skillful for you to gather a phone number so then you can text them, alerts, reminders, et cetera. That’s a great way. There’s a wonderful book called how to, what is it? Never lose a customer again. And it’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful book.
Anne Stefanyk (19:11):
It applies to any business. And it really talks about like how when you’re engaging with a new client, the first two stages of that are the are the sales and presales. But then you have six steps. Once a person becomes your clients on how to nurture and engage and support that client journey. And that might just be simply as like if they’re deciding to work with you and they book their first appointments, there’s a lot of cool video. You could just do a little video recording and say, you know, thank you so much for booking an appoint with me. I’m so excited. I really honor the personal relationship that we have together and I want to build trust. So this is a just, and then giving them like a forum to then ask the question to you. So just building that relationship. Cause even though your clients, I mean if they’re coming for PT, they might just be a onetime client.
Anne Stefanyk (19:57):
But again, they also might have lots of friends and family and that works. So when their friends and family and network happened to have that, how do you also kind of leverage the website that way? But a lot of it is just clarity. And you’ll notice that big way to find out what’s missing is interview your last few clients that have signed up, find out what they found was easy, what was difficult, what they wish they had more information. And if they’re a recent enough client, they’ll still remember that experience and us humans love to help. It’s in their nature, right? So you should never feel worried about asking anybody for advice or insights on this. You know, there’s even a little tool that you can put on your websites. It’s a tool, there’s a free version called Hotjar, hot and hot jar.
Anne Stefanyk (20:47):
And it’s pretty easy to install. We actually have a blog post on how to install it too. It’s really, we’ll put that blog posts, but what it allows you to do is it allows you to see where people are clicking and whether they’re not clicking on your website. So you can actually analyze, you know it’s all anonymous, right? It’s all anonymously tracked, but you can do screencast and you can do with these color heatmaps, you can kind of see where people are going. You can track this and it’s free, right? Three you can do up to three pages for free. So I feel like the guys looking at stuff like that, you kind of get the data that you need to figure out where your gaps are because what you don’t know is what you don’t know, right? So I first recommend like getting clear on who your user is, you know, if you specifically take care of a certain set, figuring out where their journey is, what kind of content you’d need for each of those and what the gaps are. And then filled out a content calendar to fill the gaps.
Karen Litzy (21:42):
Got it. And a content calendar could be like a once a month blog post. It doesn’t have to be every day. And I even think that can overwhelm you’re patients or potential patients, right? Cause we’re just inundated. There’s so much noise, but if you have like a really great blog that comes out once a month and gets a lot of feedback on it, then people will look forward to that.
Anne Stefanyk (22:11):
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, humans want to get clarity, they want to receive value. And right now we live in an intention economy where everything is pinging at them. So realistically, the only way to break through the noise is just to be really clear and provide what they need. Simple. It’s just simple. It’s actually, you just simplify it, remove the jargon, you know, make it easy. And I mean a blog post, it could be as short as 300 words. You don’t need to write a massive thing. You can even do a little video blog. Yeah. You don’t like writing, you can just do a little video blog and embedded YouTube video and boom, you’re done. Right?
Karen Litzy (22:46):
Yeah. Yeah. I love this because everything that you’re saying doesn’t take up a lot of time. Cause like we said before, when you’re first starting out as a new entrepreneur, you feel like you’ve been pulled in a million different directions. But if you can say, I’m going to take one hour, like you said, one hour a month to do a website check-in, right? One hour a month to get a blog post together or shoot a quick video. Like you said, we’ve all got phones embedded in every device we own these days. So it doesn’t take a lot. And I love all those suggestions. Okay. So now I’m in the nurturing phase and what we’ve done is, because I didn’t use jargon, I was simple, clear to the point, filled in the gaps for them. Now those patients that who have come to see me are referring their friends to me and we’re starting it all over again. So it’s sort of this never ending positive cycle.
Anne Stefanyk (23:41):
Exactly, exactly. And that’s what we really frame. We call it continuous improvement, which is the methodology of that. You always need to be taking care of it, nurturing it, loving it. Because if you just let it sit, it will do you no good. Right. And that’s where you know, when you’re that little bit of momentum and it’s about pacing yourself and choosing one goal at a time. Like if you’re feeling like, Oh my gosh, where am I going to start? What am I going to do? You know, just say, okay, I just want my site to go faster. Just pick one goal. You run it through the speed test, it’s scoring forward of a hundred you’re like, Oh, I need to make my site faster. So then you look at that and you say, okay, I’ve learned, you know, big images create large page speed load. So it’ll tell, you can go through and look at your images and say, Oh, I need to resize this image. Or maybe I need, if I’m using WordPress, put a plugin that automatically resizes all my images. You know, a lot of it is content driven that you can kind of make your cycle faster with an accessibility. Accessibility is so dear and near to my heart.
Karen Litzy (24:44):
When you say accessibility for a website, what exactly does that mean?
Anne Stefanyk (24:48):
I mean, yes. So that means that it is technically available for people of all types of ranges of ability from someone who is visually impaired to someone who is physically impaired, temporarily or permanently disabled. So if you think about someone who’s got a broken arm and maybe it’s her dominant arm. I’m doing everything with my left. Try using a screen reader on your own website and you will be shocked that if you can’t type you know with your hands and you’re going to dictate to it, you’ll be a, is how your computer does not actually understand your words. So it’s about making your website really technically accessible with consideration. Four, font size, color contrast. Yeah. Images need to have what we call alt tags, which is just a description. So if your image is like one, two, three, four, five dot JPEG, you would actually want to rename it as lady sitting in a chair reading in a book dot JPEG because that’s what a screen reader reads. Oh. So it’s about the technical stuff, so that if somebody needs to use a screen reader or if somebody can’t use their hands from physical, they can’t type, they’re reading, they’re listening to the website. It’s about structural, putting it together correctly so the tools can output.
Karen Litzy (26:12):
Mmm. Wow. I never even thought of that. Oh my gosh, this is blowing my mind. Anyway, so there’s tools out there to look, let’s talk about if you want to just maybe give a name to some of those tools. So how about to check your websites?
Anne Stefanyk (26:28):
Yeah, so it’s Google page speed and it’s just a website that you can go in and put your URL. There’s another plugin called lighthouse, and lighthouse is a plugin that you can use through Chrome. And then you just on that and it’ll output a report for you. And some of it’s a little nerdy, right? And some of it’s, you know, some of it’s very clear. I love it. They, they’ll put some jargon, let’s just say that they don’t quite understand that not everybody understands laptop, but if you’re on a tool like Shopify or Squarespace or Wix, which a lot of like first time entrepreneurs, that’s a great place to start. It’s really affordable. They take care of a lot of those things built in. So that’s the benefit of kind of standing on the shoulders of giants when it comes to those. But lighthouse is a good tool because it checks accessibility, performance, SEO and your coding best practices.
Karen Litzy (27:28):
Oh wow. Okay. So that’s a good tool. Cool, any other tools that we should know about that you can think of off the top of your head? If not, we can always put more in the show notes if people want to check them out. But if you have another one that you wanted to throw out there, I don’t want to cut you off, if you’ve got more.
Anne Stefanyk (27:45):
Oh no worries. There’s lots of different checkers and I think the big thing error is just to be able to understand the results. So I’m always a big fan of making technology really accessible. So if you do need help with that, you know, feel free to reach out and I can get more help. But generally we look at search engine optimization, which is are you being found in Google? And there’s some tools like SEO. Moz is one. And then we look at accessibility, is it accessible to all people and then we look at performance, can it go fast, fast, and then we look at code quality, right? Like you want to make sure you’re doing your security updates cause it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to do your security updates than unpack yourself if there is.
Karen Litzy (28:27):
Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, like you said, on some of those websites, that security part might be in like already embedded in that or is that, do you recommend doing an external security look at your website as well?
Anne Stefanyk (28:44):
Exactly. Most of the time when you’re using a known platform like Shopify or if you’re using WordPress or Drupal, then what you want to do is you want to work with a reliable hosting provider so they will help you provide your security updates. It’s just like you would always want to lock your car when you would go out in the city. It’s just like some do your security updates. So, but yeah, that’s the benefit of being on some of these larger platforms is they have some of that stuff baked in. You pay a monthly fee but you don’t have to worry about it.
Karen Litzy (29:14):
Right. Perfect. Perfect. And gosh, this was so much good information. Let’s talk a little bit about, since we are still in the midst of this COVID pandemic and crisis and what should we be doing with our websites now specifically to sort of provide that clarity and calmness that maybe we want to project while people are still a little, I mean, I watch the news people are on edge here.
Anne Stefanyk (29:47):
Yeah. I think everybody’s a little on edge, especially as things are starting to open. But nervous about it. All right. So I think the main thing that you can do is provide clear pathways. So if you haven’t already put an alert on your website or something, right on your homepage, that speaks to how you’re handling COVID that would be really skillful in, that could just be if you, you know, Mmm. Some people have an alert bar, they can put up, some people use a blog post and they feature it as their blog posts. Some people use a little block on their home page, but just something that helps them understand that what that is, and I’m sure most of you have already responded to that cause you had to write, it was like the first two weeks, all of our clients were like, we got to put something on our website.
Anne Stefanyk (30:26):
Right. And so, from there is I think being very mindful about how overwhelmed your peoples are and not trying to flood them with like tips and tricks on how to stay calm or how to parent or how to, you know, like that’s where everybody’s kind of like on overwhelm of all the information. So for right now, I would say that it’s a wonderful time to put an alert up so people visit your site. If you’ve switched to telehealth and telemedicine, it’d be a great time to actually clarify how to do that. So if they’re like, okay, I’m going to sign up for this and I want to work with you. Mmm. But how does it work? Are we gonna do it through zoom? Is it through Skype? Is it through FaceTime? Is my data secure? You know, like you said, updating all your FAQ is like, we’re in this weird space where we really have almost like no excuse to not come out of this better.
Anne Stefanyk (31:16):
You know, as an entrepreneur we have this like lurking sense of like, okay, I gotta make sure I’m doing something. And the web is a great place to start because it is your first impression. And to kind of go through your content, and maybe it is if you don’t have a blog set up is setting up a blog and just putting one up there or writing two or three and not publishing it until you have two or three. But it is kind of figuring out what is your user need and how do you make it really easy for them to digest.
Karen Litzy (31:41):
Perfect. And now before we kind of wrap things up, I’ll just ask you is there anything that we missed? Anything that you want to make sure that the listeners walk away with from this conversation?
Anne Stefanyk (31:56):
I think the big thing is that this can all get really confusing and overwhelming very quickly. And all you need to just think about is your humans that you’re servicing and like how can I make their journey easier? And even if it’s like if nothing else, you’re like, Hey, I’m going to get a text messaging program set up because I’m going to be able to actually communicate with them a lot faster and a lot easier. Or, Hey, I’m just going to focus on getting more five stars reviews on my Google profiles, so I show up. I’m just going to make that the focus. So I think the big thing is just a one thing at a time, and because we’re in a pandemic, set your bar really low and celebrate when you barely hit it because we’re all working on overwhelm and overdrive and we’re all exhausted and our adrenals are depleted. Even in overdrive syndrome for like 11 weeks or something. Now I know it’s kind of like, Oh my goodness, my websites maybe a hot mess. I’m going to get one thing and I’m going to give myself a lot of wiggle room to make sure that I can take care of the pressing needs and just being really like patient because it isn’t a journey where you’re going to have your website and your entire business.
Karen Litzy (33:00):
Yeah. We never got to turn off your website. Right. I hope not. Oh, you never will. Right. Telemedicine is going to give you a new kind of way to practice too. It’s revolutionizing the way we treat patients. A hundred percent yeah, absolutely. I personally have have been having great success and results with telehealth. And so I know that this is something that will be part of my practice going forward, even as restrictions are lowered. I mean here in New York, I mean you’re in San Francisco, like we’re both in areas that are on pretty high alert still. But this is something that’s definitely gonna be part of my practice. So if there is a silver lining to come out of this really horrible time, I think that is one of them. From a healthcare standpoint, I think it’s been a game changer because you’re still able to help as you put it, help your humans, you know, help those people so that they’re not spinning out on their own. So I love it. Now final question and I ask everyone this, knowing where you are in your life and in your career, what advice would you give yourself as a new graduate right out of college? So it’s before, even before you started.
Anne Stefanyk (34:21):
Yes, yes. Honor my downtime. I think especially as a girl boss, that’s always like, I’ve been an entrepreneur pretty much since I was in high school. I never took weekends and evenings for myself until I became like a little older. I would’ve definitely done more evenings and weekends because the recharge factor is just amazing for the brain. When you actually let it rest, it figures out all the problems on its own, get out of your own way and it’ll like just, you know, even this COVID stuff. I find it so interesting that you know, as a boss you feel like you want to do so much and you want to get it done and you want to help your staff and you’ve got to figure out how to be there for them and then it’s like, wait, you gotta put on your own mask before you put it on the others.
Anne Stefanyk (35:04):
And I feel like healthcare professionals, it’s like so important for you to honor that little bit of downtime that you have now. Yeah, I mean, if I knew that back then, I’d probably be way stronger way would have honored myself. And as a woman, self care seems, we put it like second to our business and our families and second, third, fourth, fifth. So it’s like, you know, advice to pass out. Let’s take care of you. Yeah. It will be great. You will do wonderful things. Take care of you. You’ll feel great. You know, I broke my ankle because I wasn’t taking care of myself. Yeah.
Karen Litzy (35:36):
Oh wow. What advice. Yeah. Honor the downtime. I think that’s great. And I think it’s something that a lot of people just don’t do. They think that in that downtime you should be doing something else. So you’re failing.
Anne Stefanyk (35:48):
Yeah. And it’s just so silly. It’s just this weird, you know mental game that we have to play with ourselves. I listened to one of your recent podcasts and I just loved the girl that was on there said like, you know, successes is 20% skill, 80% of mind game. And I could not agree with that. You know, having a company full of women, imposter syndrome is the number one thing that I help coach my females with. It’s like, no, you know exactly what you’re doing because nobody knows what they’re doing. We all learn, right? There’s no textbook for a lot of this stuff. Like we went to school, there was a textbook, there was structure. We got out of school and now we’re like go learn. It’s like okay, okay so I find the entrepreneurial journey so cool. And that means like kind of like also finding out other tribes like where can we lean into and that’s why I love you have this podcast cause it really focuses on like building a tribe of entrepreneurs that are focusing on taking it to the next level. Like how can we be empowering them to do their best, be their best selves.
Karen Litzy (36:47):
Exactly. I’m going to just use that as a tagline from now on for the buck. Perfect marketing tagline. Well and thank you so much. Where can people find more about you and more about kanopi.
Anne Stefanyk (37:00):
So you can go to kanopi or you can simply just look for me just go to kanopi on the Googles and you’ll find me. But if you want to reach out via LinkedIn or anywhere, I’m always just a big fan of helping people make technology really clear and easy to understand. So find me on LinkedIn or on stuff and we can chat more there.
Karen Litzy (37:23):
Awesome. Well thank you so much. And to everyone listening, we’ll have all of the links that we spoke about today and I know there were a lot, but they’re all going to be in the show notes at podcasts.healthywealthysmart.com under this episode. So Anne, you have given so much great information. I can’t thank you enough.
Anne Stefanyk (37:39):
Well thank you so much for it. I’m really grateful for the work that you’re doing. I think it’s fantastic.
Karen Litzy (37:45):
Thank you. And everyone else. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy, and smart.
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