Nursing Home Help & AgingMO got the quality online care they needed!

April 26, 2019

Improving Quality Care for Missouri’s Older Residents

Nursing Home Help, a training team sponsored by the University of Missouri’s Sinclair School of Nursing, is dedicated to improving care for nursing home residents through staff training and helping nursing facilities come up with policies and processes that meet state regulations. AgingMO is a research team supported by the University of Missouri’s Aging in Place program that provides independent living resources and support for Missouri’s older residents who are living at home.

Until recently, both teams used extremely outdated and hard-to-manage websites (seriously, completely static? Ouch!) and struggled not only with updating them but also with effectively reaching their respective target markets, which in no way overlapped. They were looking to create two all new websites to further reach those audiences, websites that were more functional, manageable and waaaaay better looking than what they had. Lucky for us, we were privileged enough to be able to help them get where they wanted to go.

Knowing When to Keep Things Separate

A huge challenge in marketing for any business or organization is trying to reach more than one target market — specifically knowing whether or not you need more than one brand for marketing to each. Ultimately, finding an answer to a question like that comes down to examining a few factors — Are the respective services related? Do the audiences overlap at all or are they completely separate? Will one brand hinder the success of the other? How long do you plan to market both brands? — In the case of Nursing Home Help and AgingMO, there’s no overlap in the target audiences they’re trying to reach, so they decided to build two websites to speak directly to each:

• The Nursing Home Help website is a central location for resources, news, and events related to their programs for improving care for nursing home residents throughout Missouri.
• AgingMO is the online home for the University of Missouri’s Aging in Place program and its related project and houses resources in support of independent living for Missouri’s older residents.

As a group of researchers and trainers offering so many resources and activities to two completely different target markets, they needed websites they could easily manage to keep their respective visitors informed of their training, events, research and project development without the headache and frustration they experienced trying to update the darn things.

Organization, Streamlined Processes, and Automation

It’s hard to believe the power of these words until you’ve experienced them yourself… a website that’s easy to use, easy to update, AND sends updates to email subscribers automatically? Yeah, these are all real possibilities, and they’re revolutionizing time management for so many companies and organizations, including Nursing Home Help and AgingMO.

How so, you ask? Let’s take a look:

Organization

A website should be as easy to use as a coffee mug. No matter how much content is on it how many pages you’ve got, visitors should be able to land on a website and intuitively know exactly how to get where they want to go. We worked to achieve this on both the Nursing Home Help and AgingMO sites by using a split navigation at the top to help emphasize services, resource categories for quick sorting, large clearly-labeled buttons with icons, and a sectioned format to keep the content in easily-digestible blocks.

Nursing Home Help promotes events through each of the different branches of their grant program, so they needed a way to manage all of them together by branch. With the new Nursing Home Help website, team members can enter events into one place and then sort them by category, topic, and region. This translates directly to how events are displayed for visitors when they’re on the front end, making for simple organization for everyone!

Streamlined Processes

To us, using WordPress is second nature, but we realize some of our clients aren’t as web savvy. To keep confusion at a minimum, we built forms within WordPress that allow Nursing Home Help employees to easily add events, news, and resources to the website without having to know anything about web development. They simply visit a password-protected page of the site and complete the form we’ve built for them, and BAM! Event, news and resource information is added to the website immediately!

This definitely takes some pressure off of the administrative staff to make all updates to the website, which boosts efficiency in maintaining website content. And it makes training new people to update the site easy because the process is centered around using a skill they already have: completing an online form.

Automation

Gone are the days of sending one-off email notifications and updates…. On the Nursing Home Help site, when visitors submit event registration forms or sign up to receive news or resource information, they’re automatically added to the respective email list(s). When new content goes up on the website like an event, news, or resource, an email auto generates and sends to the list. It’s a pretty big time saver. We use the same feature (it’s a MailChimp thing) for our Weekly Pride Maker. RSS to email is an extremely versatile and useful online tool for your website… if you haven’t heard of it, you might look into how it can help your business or organization.

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A Classier Look…

To top off all this goodness, both Nursing Home Help and AgingMO are sleekly laid out using:

• Simple, clean designs that feature appealing color schemes that update based on which section the visitor is in for clear navigation
• Colorful yet understated buttons
• Custom icons that update based on respective categories

Other features on the new Nursing Home Help and AgingMO websites include:

• Mobile Friendly Design – Adaptive Template
  Websites that are built with mobile-friendly with adaptive templates will be served more often on search engines to people using their mobile devices.
• Custom WordPress Theme
  With Custom WordPress Themes, the website design is unique and the structure is flexible, scalable, and easily manageable. Let’s just say websites with custom WordPress themes aren’t forced to reside inside the box.
• Safe Site Plan
  The new Nursing Home Help and AgingMO websites are enrolled in our Company Safe Site Plan, meaning we’ve enhanced the sites in an effort to offensively protect them from hackers. We backup the sites daily, maintain regular WordPress and plugin updates, and monitor site activity and link function.
• Updates & Ongoing Maintenance
  It’s imperative to keep content fresh with regular updates to keep clients and prospects interested. With their website completed, we keep Nursing Home Help on top of their game by performing requested updates and changes to the website as requested.
• Automated Email Newsletters
  With MailChimp’s automated email feature integrated into the Nursing Home Help and AgingMO websites, news/resource subscribers and event registrants automatically receive emails as news, publications, resources, and event updates are added to the site.
• Custom Team Pages
  The teams featured on the Nursing Home Help website display team members based on the department they’re associated with, which means staff members are added to the website on the back end in one place. Each team member is assigned to the appropriate grant program branch in their profile so they appear in the correct place on the front end. This keeps staff information organized and easy to maintain. Did I mention a team member can be listed in more than one grant program with the check of a box? Oh, and since each member’s information is edited in one centralized location, published updates are reflected throughout the entire site anywhere and everywhere that information appears! It’s like magic!
  
  On AgingMO’s team page, visitors can click on a person and send them a message using an email form…but the killer thing about this feature? The email form auto populates to send to the corresponding team member. Super duper fancy!

Are you looking for a website?

Does your site lack organization and automation, or do you just need a site in general? Contact the team at MayeCreate Design. We believe websites work when good design meets solid functionality. Our web designs always aim for ease of use and clear communication. Check out our portfolio for a look at our other projects and to get your pride on…today.