The Banyan Theory Blog

Community Spotlight: Feline Fix 🐈‍⬛

Allison — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 17:01:00 GMT

At the end of year year, the team at Banyan Theory chooses to make donations to a few organizations that have made a meaningful impact in our community and/or in our own lives. We encourage you to find out more about the mission of each organization (and make a donation as well, whether to this group or a similar one in your own community).

Allison's Pick for 2024:

Allison is a Crazy Cat Lady who is passionated about helping stray & abandoned cats find homes, as well as reduce the feral cat population via TNR. At any given moment, there are foster cats scattered throughout her house.

Allison chose to donate to Feline Fix - a critical partner to the cat ladies in the KC area, providing discounted spay/neuter, vaccines, and emergency vet care.

About Feline Fix

Feline Fix is a small non-profit group dedicated to helping stray, abandoned and feral cats in the KC area through discounted vet care and adoption services.

They also help local cat owners obtain lower cost spay & neuter services.

Individual cat rescuers provide a valuable (but mostly invisible) service to their communities by filling the gaps left by underfunded or non-existent animal control and rescue services by:

Trapping stray and feral cats
Transporting cats to vet care or to new homes
Paying for vet care for trapped cats
Delivering food and water to community cat colonies
Fostering and rehoming adoptable cats
Providing assistance to those who need help with vet care and/or food and litter

In most areas, there's no financial assistance or tax deduction available for any of this expense.

Without organizations like Feline Fix, the individuals in the cat rescue community would be as lost and unsupported as the cats they work to help.

How You Can Help

Regardless whether you love cats or view them as pests who harm wildlife, your community depends on you to help reduce the population of stray cats.

Fix your cats, even if you don't think they'll ever go outside.
Microchip your cats, even if you don't think they'll ever get lost.
If you feed a stray cat, get it fixed (look for groups like Feline Fix in your area for help).
Look for the [cat] helpers in your community who could use a hand, whether it's donations, food/litter or short-term fostering.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Community Spotlight: Great Plains SPCA 🐾

Andrew — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:05:00 GMT

Andrew's Pick for 2024:

As a life-long dog owner (and lover), Andrew chose Great Plains SPCA, a local nonprofit no-kill animal shelter in the Kansas City area, providing compassionate care for 5,000 animals annually.

About Great Plains SPCA

Great Plains SPCA is a nonprofit organization making a significant difference in the lives of animals across the Kansas City metro area. As one of the leading no-kill animal shelters in the region, they provide affordable services while focusing on building a compassionate community for animals.

At the heart of their mission is a commitment to provide life-saving services for approximately 5,000 animals every year.

They provide a safe haven, medical care, and rehabilitation for animals who are abandoned, neglected, surrendered, or homeless.

Great Plains SPCA proudly has a live release rate of 98% as a part of the no-kill shelter movement. Here are some of the impactful ways they support pets and the community:

No-kill Animal Rescue and Rehabilitation
Adoption Services
Low-Cost Veterinary Services
Community Education and Resources
Lost and Found Program

The average cost of care per animal is $1,350, while adoption fees average just $173, leaving a $1,177 shortfall per animal.

Donations are essential to help bridge this gap, ensuring every animal receives the care they need. Every service they provide is designed to give animals a second chance at life and unite them with forever homes.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Not Just for Insurance Anymore

Allison — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 19:01:00 GMT

We get asked often if we do websites that are not insurance-related. In the past, we've been 100% focused on insurance, but we've made some exciting updates at our neighboring platform Webtricity. So now we can enthusiastically answer YES, we do all sorts of websites.

Through our Webtricity brand, we offer a range of plans, from DIY to full-service, white glove design & management for a variety of types of organizations.

Templates are diverse and the software is powerful and flexible, but easy for even the most inexperienced user to figure out. A professional, complete website can be built and launched in as little as 15 minutes.

Some of the types of small business websites that can be created with Webtricity include:

Contractors
Lawn care & landscaping services
Plumbers
Consultants
Financial services (accountants, financial advisors, etc)
Vacation rental properties
Plumbers

If you're looking for a website for a small business, side-hustle or hobby, check out Webtricity for a flexible, affordable, and professional solution.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Banyan Theory is now a Trusted Choice TechCompare Vendor

Allison — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 10:43:00 GMT

We are excited to announce that Banyan Theory has been added to the Trusted Choice TechCompare program as insurance agency website vendors.

This means that another big name in insurance agrees that we build great websites and provide quality customer service.

It also means that your Banyan Theory website expenses may be eligible for the Trusted Choice Marketing Reimbursement Program.

For more information on the Trusted Choice Marketing Reimbursement Program, visit trustedchoice.independentagent.com

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

A Refreshingly Different Email About Pricing

Allison — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:19:00 GMT

Are you tired of receiving emails about pricing increases from the services you depend on? Check out our take. We hope you find it refreshing.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Blog Topic Idea: What Policy?

Allison — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 14:35:00 GMT

Incidents like these must have some interesting insurance implications.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Announcing Slack Integration

Nick — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 13:47:00 GMT

We're happy to announce that insurance agency websites from Banyan Theory now come with Slack integration, at no additional cost.

In case you're not familiar, Slack is an internal communications app, where your agency staff can communicate with each other individually, in groups, or company-wide. It's faster, easier, and more secure than email.

With our new Slack integration, when a visitor submits a form on your agency website, such as a quote request or contact message, you'll be notified via Slack, like this:

Notifications can be sent to a Slack channel — like #general — or to an individual Slack user. For our company, we use a dedicated #website channel, but it's designed to work however is best for you.

If you have a website from Banyan Theory, you can enable Slack integration from your website dashboard. Go to Website → Website Settings → Slack Integration and follow the steps there.

If you don't have a website from Banyan Theory, feel free to check out our website design preview tool, our sample websites, and our pricing.

Check out our list of integrations.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Insurance Website Accessibility and ADA Compliance

Nick — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 18:10:00 GMT

If you have an insurance agency website, you've probably heard the terms website accessibility and ADA compliance. We'd like to help you understand your responsibilities as a business owner with a website, and how we can help.

First, let's cover some relevant terms:

Accessibility is a measure of how accessible—or usable, or reachable—something is, especially (in this context) as it pertains to people with one or more disabilities. If a store can only be entered through a door at the top of a flight of steps, then that store is inaccessible to a person who requires a wheelchair.
Website accessibility is a measure of how accessible a website is. Just like a store with stairs but no wheelchair ramp or elevator, websites can have barriers making them difficult or impossible for people with disabilities to use.
ADA compliance addresses whether "public accommodations" (like stores and websites) are fully accessible to people with disabilities, as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

The ADA was passed into law in 1990, predating the World Wide Web, and as such it does not explicitly address websites, but rather public accommodations. That term, originally understood to mean physical places, has evolved. U.S. courts have since ruled in some cases that public websites constitute public accommodations and thus are required to provide full and equal access to everyone, including people with disabilities.

We believe that all people should have full and equal opportunity to participate in every aspect of society and commerce, regardless of ability, and we're doing our part by aiming to have the websites we build to be accessible to all. We're constantly learning more about website accessibility, keeping an eye on evolving accessibility-related technology and policy changes, and applying our knowledge and understanding to improve our offerings.

At present, the web accessibility landscape is unfortunately shadowed by legal uncertainty, as there is no official standard for ADA compliance as it relates to websites. Federal courts have referenced the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a means of measuring compliance, and as a result we work off of these guidelines.

Types of disabilities affecting website users

It's important to be aware that there are different types of disabilities that may affect a person's ability to consume information from and interact with your website, including but certainly not limited to:

visual impairments like blindness, colorblindness, or blurred vision
hearing impairments like deafness or difficulty hearing
motor impairments like difficulty using input devices (a mouse or trackpad)

Some disabilities—and how they affect the use of a website—may be easier to understand than others, but it's important to take into account disabilities you may not be familiar with.

For instance, a colorblind person, especially one with a red/green deficiency, may be unable to distinguish between a green "success" indicator and a red "error" indicator. A person with a motor impairment may have difficulty clicking a small button.

Accounting for a wide range of disabilities is where the accessibility guidelines come in.

How accessibility guidelines help

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are written not just for website creators, but also for assistive technology makers. (Assistive technologies in this case are hardware and software components that make it easier for people with disabilities to interact with websites. A common one you may have heard of is a screen reader, which reads the content of a website aloud for people with visual impairments.)

The idea behind the guidelines is to get websites, web browsers, and assistive technologies to all use a common interface to define and consume content. If a website adheres to the guidelines, then web browsers and screen readers alike can extract the content more easily and present it to their users. For example, a web browser will typically display an <em> (emphasis) tag using italic text, like this, while a screen reader will place verbal emphasis on those words, the way you would when speaking.

Your responsibilities as a business owner

Just as you need to make public physical spaces (like your office) accessible to people who use wheelchairs, you should also ensure your insurance agency website is accessible to people with disabilities. This means avoiding and preventing a wide range of potential accessibility problems from being present on your website by ensuring it meets the necessary guidelines described by the WCAG document.

Here are a few high-impact improvements to consider making to your website now:

add "alternative text" to all images¹ so they can be audibly described to people who cannot see them,
ensure all videos on your website have closed captioning,
ensure the website is fully usable with a keyboard only (no mouse or other pointer device),
make click & tap targets are big enough and not too close together,
use text colors with enough contrast compared to their background colors,
underline textual links, or make them stand out from the surrounding text.

Your website should meet or exceed the guidelines in the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines document. The WCAG's Quick Reference document is a great resource to learn more about accessibility.

Website accessibility evaluation tools

Here are some tools we use to help design accessible insurance agency websites:

Google Lighthouse, which is built into Google Chrome and has two distinct advantages. Besides being backed by a tech giant like Google, it (1) is open source, meaning anyone can contribute improvements to it, and (2) is not produced by a company that is trying to sell you something accessibility-related, removing a common bias.
WebAIM Contrast Checker, which we use for ensuring text colors have a sufficient contrast ratio when compared to the background color behind the text.
WebAIM WAVE, which we use for a more technical evaluation of the WCAG rules. It is much more aggressive than Lighthouse in identifying potential concerns, even when they are not actual accessibility issues, and it's up to the user to understand the implications.²

Here is a screenshot of the accessibility score from a Lighthouse audit run on one of our demo websites showing a perfect 100 out of 100 score. This is what we aim for on every website we build. If you have a Banyan Theory website and would like to see your score, let us know and we'll run a report. And if we find any accessibility issues, we'll resolve them.

A word of caution: automated testing tools are great at finding low-hanging fruit and sometimes even identify more complex accessibility problems. However, you should not rely on them exclusively, because they have known limitations. It's a good idea to perform manual accessibility testing as well, such as attempting to use your website with only your keyboard, without touching your mouse or trackpad.

Are Banyan Theory websites accessible?

We create our insurance agency website designs from the ground up to be fully accessible, and we do extensive accessibility evaluations and testing during the development process. We also evaluate each new website we build using the tools above, because even though they're implemented using our accessible designs, it's common for customizations to have accessibility implications. For instance, we often add custom images and videos and customize the color scheme.

If there are ever any questions about whether your website with Banyan Theory is accessible, or if any concerns are brought to your attention, let us know and we'll be happy to do a detailed evaluation as it relates to those concerns.

The most important thing

Setting aside websites and technology and accessibility laws, the most important thing you can do, on a basic human level, is to make yourself available to the people who want to communicate with you, with the understanding that some people may need different accommodations.

How we can help

If you're interested in working with a company that takes accessibility seriously³, we'd love to build you a new insurance agency website. Check out the links below and then get in touch today.

Design Builder | Sample Websites | Website Pricing

Notes

All <img> tags should have an alt attribute, but it's valid for the attribute's value to be empty if the image is purely decorative — that is, it does not convey meaning relevant to the content. An empty alt attribute tells assistive technologies to skip over the image, making it "invisible." ↩︎
This is not to say you should ignore issues you don't understand, but rather to be aware that there may be issues the tool identifies on your website that have already been evaluated and accounted for. One example is the <noscript> tag, which will always cause an "Alert" even when the tag is appropriate. ↩︎
To read more about our beliefs about accessibility, check out our website accessibility page, our accessibility policy, our accessibility statement, and our accessibility info page. ↩︎

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Short Forms vs Long Forms

Andrew — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 14:30:00 GMT

Online forms are a fast and effective way to gather quote requests from your prospective customers. This is a powerful tool for generating new leads for your business, even outside of regular office hours – but how can you maximize your forms to make sure they are working for you?

A common question we get is whether it is better to use a longer, more detailed insurance quote form, or a short and quick one. The best option can vary depending on your agency’s specific needs.

Long Quote Forms

Banyan Theory offers pre-made long quote forms for every default insurance product included on our templates. You can see examples of each long form on our Coastal View template. You can even customize our pre-made quote forms with your own fields to suit your needs.

Long forms allow you to gather pertinent information from your leads so you can provide a more accurate insurance quote. It also helps cut down on communication back and forth, and it gives the lead a little more “skin” in the game because they've dedicated more time to completing the form. This means they are obviously serious about buying insurance.

This all sounds great, but before you decide to add long forms to every insurance product, consider the tradeoff. If a lead is requesting quotes from several agencies, or if they don’t have much time, they will be more likely to leave your website when they see a long form. We also recommend keeping the required fields to a minimum, because leads may not have all of this information readily available (e.g. driver’s license number, VIN, annual mileage, etc.).

Short Quote Forms

By default, we build insurance websites with simple quick quote forms for every product (example). These short forms are a great way to quickly gather some basic information so you can begin working with potential customers. Users can easily drop in their name and contact information with no detailed or hard-to-find information required – making it easy to request multiple quotes from your agency.

While these short forms are great for motivating users to easily submit a request, users may have the tendency to request multiple quotes from multiple companies, and these leads tend to go “cold” quickly. Be sure to follow up on quote requests as soon as possible! Our website autoresponder is a great way to instantly make contact via email with a lead to let them know that you received their request and will get back to them shortly.

How to Choose the Best Option

There are pros and cons to both types of forms. Long forms typically provide more committed leads that are easier to quote, contact, and close, but as a general rule of thumb, long forms typically bring in less leads overall. On the other hand, short forms traditionally generate more leads each month, but those leads may be harder to reach or less interested in purchasing insurance right away.

Long forms (on average) → more info, easier to quote, but less frequent
Short forms (on average) → less info, need to contact in order to quote, but more frequent

We recommend working with your website account manager to develop a strategy that fits your agency’s needs. We can help you easily test different options to see what yields the best results. We’ve been in the insurance website business for since 2007, and we understand that each agency is different. Contact us today to see how we can help you get the most out of your online presence.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com

Using Credit Card Points for Good - Year 2

Allison — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 15:30:00 GMT

Banyan Theory turns our credit card points into charitable donations. Here's the simple way it's done and how we chose to help make a difference in our community again this year.

Read the full article at lightrailsites.com