87 Is It Time to Bulldoze Your Website? - Cory Dotson Nov 17 2021

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine,

Kevin Weitzel: and I'm Kevin Wetizel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: We are excited today to welcome to the show Cory Dotson, the Senior Director of Web Development from Blue Tangerine. Welcome Cory. Thanks for joining us.

Cory Dotson: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, Cory, why don't you start us off with that quick and simple introduction, help people get to know you a little bit better.

Cory Dotson: Yes, I am the Senior Director of Web Development and IT here at Blue Tangerine.

I oversee our [00:01:00] development department, all of our developers and designers, and all the exciting stuff that happens and goes into creating awesome websites. When I'm not working, I am playing golf. Sometimes eating good food. I love good food. So, I like trying new restaurants and new food when I can find time to do that, cause I got, two little girls, a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, and that keeps me pretty busy when I'm not working.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, thank you for mentioning golf and food, two things that I love a lot because I was petrified of today's session because I was worried that you guys were going to nerd out and geek out so much that I was just going to feel like dunce cap.

Cory Dotson: No, you got it. We share that in common. It's something that Kevin and I know that we share. It's our love for food.

Greg Bray: Let's go a little deeper. What is the number one food on the love list?

Cory Dotson: Gosh, your favorite food. I'll let you go first, Kevin.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, for me, it's casseroley type, hardy [00:02:00] feel good food. That food that when you're done eating, you're like, oh, that was so rewarding.

Cory Dotson: It's comfort food.

Kevin Weitzel: It's a comfort food. That and just a raw fish. I love sushi.

Cory Dotson: Oh, man. You hit two, two of my favorites, but I gotta say Italian. Number one for me, anything red sauce. I am like old school red sauce Italian. I could eat that every night.

Kevin Weitzel: Where's the foul flag because there's no way you're as skinny as you are and you eat as much Italian food as you do.

Good genetics. That's all I can say because I don't have any other reason behind it.

Greg Bray: Well, Cory, of course, is with Blue Tangerine, so we've done some business travel together. It's great because I say, "Cory, where should we eat?" and he already knows. No matter where we go, he already knows somewhere that we should go eat. He's got like encyclopedia places to go, so.

Cory Dotson: I always have a plan.

Greg Bray: Yep. That's right.

So, Cory, why don't you tell us a little bit more about your journey into becoming a web developer and now leading a team and how you evolved in that career?

Cory Dotson: Absolutely. Yeah. I've [00:03:00] been here at Blue Tangerine for over 15 years. Which is, I don't know when I think back at that, man has it really been that long, 15 years? I still feel very young, but then when I hear that number, it makes me feel old. I started here at Blue Tangerine as a designer, actually. That's what I went to school for. I went to college for graphic design, so that wasn't just web design back then. It was a little bit of everything.

Did some print design and 3D animation, a lot of different pieces in the design realm, but then gravitated towards graphic design because, Hey, that was the thing that people were hiring for. That was the easiest placement out of school. So, started working here at Blue Tangerine as a designer, designing websites. Did that for awhile.

Slowly transitioned into doing development, starting with front end development, the HTML and CSS stuff, everything that kind of is on the front end of the site, but ultimately learning and transitioning into doing full on development. So, [00:04:00] developing the backend of the websites as well. Funny and different to go from being a designer, which is on the total opposite side, opposite brain side of the development side, and then making that transition over. It was kinda unique.

Over the years started to get into project management and client management and kind of fell in love with that side of things. I like communicating with people. I like developing relationships with people and I love solving problems. I think that's really what kind of drove me into that development side.

I could do the creative side and do the design piece, but what development filled for me was it filled that desire to be able to problem solve, and I was able to keep that same problem solving skills and utilize those in the project management piece of it too. Now, ultimately, am the director here of development and oversee the whole team, which is cool too, because it [00:05:00] gives me the opportunity to be involved in all of those pieces of the process from the top down. So, if I want to design something, I can jump in and say, Hey, I want to design that one today. I do that every once in a while, just so I can keep feeding that desire there, but it's fun. I really enjoy it. I enjoy what we do and I enjoy solving problems for our clients.

Kevin Weitzel: So, morbid curiosity, number one, and there's a follow-up. Where did you go to school? Number two was Blue Tangerine the first place you landed out of school?

Cory Dotson: Yeah, I actually went to school locally here at a local college. It's Florida Eastern State College here in Brevard County where we're headquartered out at Blue Tangerine.

I was actually in school, about halfway through the program, when the head chair of the program had a connection to an employee here at Blue Tangerine that had been here for awhile. That employee had reached out to the college and said, Hey, we've got this position for a junior designer that we're looking to fill and he came to me and said, Hey, you're perfect for this [00:06:00] job. You need to take it, and I'm like, I'm just learning this stuff, I'm just in school, and He's like, no, you need to take this job. I remember him telling me, he was so adamant about it that he's like, if you don't take this, I'm going to. He's gonna quit working for the college and go work for Blue Tangerine. I took his advice, went and did the interview and got hired. I was still taking night classes while I was working here at Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: Follow up to the followup then, now that you're in a leadership role, do you find that it's better to hire people that you could mold into the way you want things done, or would you rather have somebody comes in with their own little basket of tricks and their working knowledge? What is your preference?

Cory Dotson: I think it's good to have a mix of both. The positions can really dictate that as well, but there is something to be said about being able to kind of mold someone into the position that you're trying to fill. If you have an established process, an established group that is [00:07:00] efficient and you want them to work the way that you work, then that can be a great way to do that, but there is a lot of value in new ideas and bringing people in who may have experiences in situations that we've never been in before and unique solutions. From the development side, that's what you get. When we bring in more senior level developers, they oftentimes come with unique projects that they've worked on, unique situations where they've had to find solutions, and that can be very valuable and beneficial to what we do.

Greg Bray: So, Cory today, I think what we want to really get into is to peel back everything that goes into a website and trying to help people understand that process, that vision. Maybe address some of the mistakes that people make and make sure we can help them do it better.

So, I think the place to start with all of that is the question of when is it time to say I need a new website? We're going to go with the assumption, and maybe I shouldn't, that everybody's got one.

Okay. All right. That they've got one and they're [00:08:00] trying to decide, do I need a new one or is what I have good enough. So, what are your thoughts on, when do I need a new one?

Cory Dotson: I think the first question that someone should ask themselves, or a company should ask, is what is the website doing for me today? Am I getting leads from the website? Am I getting qualified leads from the website? Is it serving any purpose other than it just a website to have a website? I think there's a lot of people that fall in that category that at some point along the road, someone said you have to have a website, so they threw something up there to have the website and now they've never done anything with it. So, I think that's the first question. The website should be a tool and should be a very valuable resource for gaining leads and growing your business. I think a lot of companies, if they would just start with that question of what does it do for me today, and if they can't come up with anything good, then it's time to figure out why.

When we talk about the difference between, should we take what's there today, if there is an existing website, and [00:09:00] try and bring it up to a better standard or optimize it to make it work harder for them versus building a whole new website, there's a lot of factors that do go into that.

Think about, first off, the management of the website. Is the reason it's not working for them today because they can't update it because some high school student did it for him on the side, and they've got this site out there that they don't know how to make changes to because they don't have an intuitive admin where they can go in and actually keep it up to date. Is it old and maybe it's not optimized to work properly across multiple devices? We see the majority of traffic coming to all of our websites today, come from mobile devices, not from desktops. So, if the site's old enough, there's a chance that it just not working. All of those factors, I think, go into making that decision of, it's time to just start fresh.

Can you take one of those websites and oftentimes put quite a bit of time and effort into it to try and get it to the point that you can edit it and [00:10:00] that it's working for you? Yes. Most of the time it's probably going to be more expensive. It's going to take more time to do that than it would to just start over. The benefit of starting over is that you can customize the process. You can customize the site to match your needs as a business. There's a lot of pieces to that, from data integration to make the process of updating the site smoother and have it more connected into the systems that you already have as a business. There's just so many things that we can do there to make that website work better for you.

Greg Bray: I think there's a lot of parallels in that question that builders could probably get into between remodeling a home or bulldozing it and building from scratch.

Cory Dotson: Sure.

Greg Bray: I think it's some of the similar things, right? If there's some feature in that old house that you really want to keep because it's unique and special, and in the web world that might be an integration piece or something, but in general, it's probably cheaper and faster to bulldoze the thing.

Kevin Weitzel: But Greg, the difference is that when you're [00:11:00] remodeling a home, it may have good bones. It may have some historic reference. It may have some character that you want to maintain. You want to replace a crappy old website. Websites, they age. They get tired. You don't want that dung to represent your company.

Greg Bray: We appreciate you keeping this family friendly, Kevin.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm keeping it family friendly. I'm doing it just for you Greg.

Greg Bray: Because we know how many kids listened to this podcast.

Cory Dotson: It's true. There's no historic value there to have that old website out there to try and preserve it.

Kevin Weitzel: I do have a question for you Cory when it comes to making decisions on whether to implement a website or not. So, let's say you do move forward and you want to create a new website. How often do you work with people like me that know what I want to see and how I want it to work, but I can't convey that to you? Do you have tools in place that you can make the process easier for the Mungo's of the world, such as myself to be able to get the information to you that you need to be able to build a meaningful [00:12:00] and engaging website?

Cory Dotson: We start all of our projects with a discovery project and that's where all of the, what I refer to, that's where the magic happens. We can go build it and all the magic happens over there, but without a solid plan of what we're doing and understanding the needs the unique needs of an individual builder we're just running off building a website. That discovery project is vital to the success and the efficiency of the development of the project as well. So, we have a plan. We sit down. Usually this is over a course of multiple meetings where we start going through from the top down, what does this website need to do for you?

The cool thing is we've got so much experience in the home building industry that, like I said, I've been here 15 years and so not only is that 15 years of development experience, but that's 15 years of very specific home builder development experience. I've worked with so [00:13:00] many different home builders from large production builders to small custom builders to know, and be able to come to that meeting and that conversation with a lot of recommendations and best practices that we've just learned over the years.

So, we're not starting from scratch. We're coming in with a foundation of, we know that you should do X, Y, and Z, but there's specific nuances and customizations that we want to make sure that we can iron out to make the site work specifically for them. So, we'll walk through those processes. Very much step-by-step of in your specific market, how do people search for homes? There's a lot of things that can be geographically specific to a home builder because of the way that they market in their area or how people search for homes in their area. It can get very much down to specific things like the type of homes that they build and needing different tools on the site to market specific to those types of homes. So, we go through [00:14:00] that process of figuring out what needs to be there, and then developing a site that has the tools to manage it exactly the way that they need to for their business all while guiding that process along the way.

Greg Bray: So Cory, along with that discovery then, a little more detail on a couple of those key questions that a builder should be prepared to answer during some of those discussions?

Cory Dotson: Yeah. Like I just mentioned, we've worked with such a wide range from large production builders to small custom builders. The big differences there is the amount of content, the amount of homes and options to search for is quite different. So, that's one of the big driving factors that's really common is how many locations are you building in? How are we going to help people quickly when they get to the website, find out do you build where I'm looking for you? Are you in the area that I'm interested in, are you in my price range, and do you have homes that I like? Being able to answer that question really fast is very important. The tools that are needed to do that vary from [00:15:00] builder to builder. Building location specific pages to help guide people in their journey.

Again, most of the traffic coming to the website, doesn't come through the homepage of the website. Oftentimes there's a lot of focus put on the home page and the homepage banner slider and all of that. I try to make this very clear right in the beginning of discovery, that all of that's important, but we can't forget that so many people are going to land on more qualified pages from Google, their Google searches within the site, and potentially never make it to the homepage, or at least not initially. So, we like to build pages that are more easily rankable within the geographic search terms. When someone searches for a new home, they're not just typing in new home. They're typing in new home in wherever. So, we want to have pages that speak specifically to that language that they're searching for and help guide the user to the results and the options that are available there. So, that's one of the [00:16:00] unique ones is just the sheer of content that's there.

There can be differences from a data standpoint is the other one that we like to uncover as early as possible. I touched on it earlier with custom data integration. Depending on the size of builder, you may have an internal system that you're using to manage your lots and your inventory, and having the ability to build a custom integration into that data set to have that data flow into the website, so then you're only managing it in one place. We're a big fans of not having to manage content in more than one place. That's something that we've stuck to for a long time. We're very much ease of updates, ease of content management, and the best way to do that is limit the amount of places that you have to change content.

If you're in a situation today where you're having to change the price of a home in [00:17:00] four different systems, then that is not working efficiently for you. When we can, we try to connect into those data sources and try and create seamless integrations into the website and that can differ from builder to builder.

Greg Bray: So, you talked about starting with this discovery stage or task, if you will, what are the other kind of key milestones that go into a whole project once discovery is done? How does it flow through to a finished product?

Cory Dotson: So, generally, discovery ends with architecture. Once we're finished with discovery, we have enough to build the blueprint of the website. So, we put together an architecture that outlines kind of a visual roadmap that shows how all of the functionality of the website connects together and helps to convey that, not from a design standpoint, but just from a functionality standpoint.

In the discovery phase, we try not to get too much into design in the beginning. Design will come and design is very important, [00:18:00] but we want to focus on the functionality and the data and what needs to be on the site and how it needs to work.

Once we've got that architecture, then we move into the design phase. So, at that point, is when we'll go through the design process of putting together a few what we would call mock-ups, trying to make sure that we're matching the branding, and that we've got design elements that are on brand. Back in the day we were doing mock-ups for everything. It was all page designs and Photoshop and stuff, and we've transitioned away from that to trying to limit the amount of mock-ups that we're doing. The issue is that this is a website. It's not meant to be viewed as a PDF. It's not meant to be viewed as a JPEG image. Getting out of that space and into the browser where we can start formatting and designing pages within the environment that the website is ultimately going to live is going to be much more efficient, much more effective, and is going to [00:19:00] help move the process along a lot smoother.

So, small design phase, jump right into the browser. We develop the site, we just jump right into the meat of the development phase, and that's building the admin tools, building the front end of the site, getting it all connected together.

One thing we have not talked about yet, content becomes very important as we start moving into the end of the development phases. We need content to add to the website. That's something that we start discussing earlier on in discovery, but we have to have content to be able to have a website. Something that a lot of people don't realize when we start working on sites is how much time it's going to take to put together that content, and to gather that into a format that can be delivered to us to put into the site. I challenge anyone who questions, the importance of good imagery and content to go to a website and turn off the [00:20:00] CSS file and hide all the images on the site. You'll see it's just a big grid of lines. It's nothing without the content. So, we go through a process of helping to get all of that content in place. Then ultimately, move towards a launching phase and a launching process of the site.

Kevin Weitzel: If I can add to the content thing, and this is a selfish addition here, because it is something that I encounter on a regular basis. Whenever I have a client that is looking at like interactive floor plans or renderings or whatever, interactive site plans, et cetera. I hear this quite often that they say we want to move forward, but we can't do this until we get our website done. Then I tell them, I'm like, you can do them in conjunction with each other. Matter of fact, you're doing the website company and your pocket book a favor because they don't have to build it with placeholders and then come back in and replace that with other content. Is that a fair assessment, or am I just crazy?

Cory Dotson: Yeah no. I agree.

Those definitely can be done in conjunction, and we'll make the website better when it launches as ,well. [00:21:00] Interactivity within the site is key. When we talk about what should I have on my website as a builder, giving someone information. Working with so many different builders, we've seen different opinions about this topic, and this comes from different sales point of views too, but the idea of limiting access to content and access the information, it just blows me away. I feel that it's very much an old school train of thought because everyone wants information. They can get it. They can get it easily. They can get it fast. That's what the internet is today. To not give someone the information that they need to make a decision about whether or not your company is someone that they're interested in doing business with, I think is a big mistake. So, from an interactive standpoint, there are a lot of tools that are effective in helping someone get to that point, help them be able to explore the home more without [00:22:00] having to come into a sales office, be able to get further down that buyer journey road before they have to initiate a conversation with someone.

Which, in most cases is what people want. Other builders are going to give it to them. They're going to give them that ability to do that from the comfort of their own home, and I think that not allowing that is definitely a negative.

Greg Bray: So, Cory, to that point, and to Kevin's point as well then, there's some work involved in creating that. I wonder Kevin, if sometimes if they're saying that to you, just because they're overwhelmed, and they can't figure out how to get it all done. So, Cory, what does someone on the builder side need to plan for this content effort? Any thoughts on how much work it can be?

Cory Dotson: You mean just gathering the content for the site?

Greg Bray: Yeah, just this idea that this is not something that you can just do for you them. There's some work on the client side that has to happen.

Cory Dotson: Absolutely, and it's not just work on the content [00:23:00] either. You know, we can talk about this as a whole, and something that we stress in the discovery process is that it's a very collaborative process. Building a website is not one-sided. You don't just hire a company and then it just an overnight, you get a site. There's information that we need. We need to know your company. We need to learn your company and how you do things, how you sell homes, what your sales process is, but most importantly, we need your content and we need the information that you want on the site. We can help guide things to an extent, but at some point it is going to take some effort on the builders side to provide that.

So, generally, we recommend that there is someone who is assigned to being the content provider. The person that's going to go out find where on drives and servers do we have all the images and floor plans and get us that information in a format that we can use. We try to make it easy by [00:24:00] providing easy spreadsheets to gather the format in a nice common structure, that's easy for them to follow and just fill in the blanks for community and plan information, and then gather the image assets as well in a nice structured, organized format, but it does take time.

There's a lot of meetings that happen along the whole course of the web development project, where we're looking to get approvals on specific milestones and to move forward to the next milestone. Oftentimes, within our average projects, the areas that you see slow down, the things that probably impact a timeline of a project the most are those moments where we can't get approval on something or we're waiting on content that hasn't been approved. We try to make that clear right up front that these are the issues that often happen, and here's how we think we can best prevent those from happening by just having [00:25:00] some dedicated time from the builder's team to be able to help us move through those quickly.

Just to touch on the design piece there, or the approval piece, we have these milestones. Again, they could be design milestones, they could be functionality milestones, where they get reviewed and approved, but one other issue that we often have with projects is that whoever our contact is with the builder, they're not, who is ultimately going to make the final decision of yes, let's launch the website.

Oftentimes, this is people that are above them. This could be a director of marketing that then needs to show it to the CEO. We try, again, to stress this within that discovery phase that get the website in front of the decision makers as soon as possible and keep it there and keep them updated on the process of the website.

Far too many times, do we get to the last phase of the website, [00:26:00] everything's been approved, and someone sees it and says that is not what I wanted. So, it's always important that everyone who is going to be making that decision is involved early on in the project. The caveat, that there's not too many people involved because there can be too many people involved, so it's narrowing it down to who's going to be making that ultimate decision and just getting their opinion and approval earlier in the process.

Greg Bray: So, what you're saying is if one person wants it blue and the other person wants a green, you can't do both?

Cory Dotson: Can't do both.

Greg Bray: Just want to make sure I'm understanding.

Cory Dotson: And don't want to change it from green to blue the night before launching the website.

Greg Bray: Yeah. There's nothing like the owner or the CEO seeing it the day before launch and being confused, for sure.

Cory, what would you say to somebody who comes to you and says, okay, we want a new website and you know what we need it live before our Parade of Homes next month. What's a [00:27:00] realistic plan and time to expect...

Kevin Weitzel: Did you say next month?

Greg Bray: Yeah, next month. Yeah. We got Parade of Homes next month, so we need a new website up.

Kevin Weitzel: I can answer that one. I don't even need Cory for that one. Go ahead, Cory.

Cory Dotson: It depends. It really does depend. This is one of those it depends like to an extreme, because the effort of a site, which ultimately determines the timeline, relies heavily on, not only the content, but also the functionality of the site, which grow based on the size of the company and their needs.

Oftentimes, we can have two sites that are very similar to each other in structure and development, but very different from each other in the amount of content that they have, and that can definitely push the timeline out. Turning a website around in a month, no matter what the website, is a very short timeline and not something that we do very often, unless it's a very small brochure-style site.

You have to respect the discovery process. When we do that [00:28:00] discovery process, that's where we build that timeline. We build how long it's going to take to create the site, and you don't want to rush it. You don't want to rush the process. I think far too many times the website is seen as an afterthought, which still makes no sense to me that the website is an afterthought to so many companies. They'll spend so much effort marketing in different channels and doing different things, but ultimately, everyone's coming to your website. They all push people to your website and you need to be proud of it and need to have something there that is going to be effective and is going to help generate the leads that you need. It's not something you want to rush. You want to make sure that you do it right. So, the average timeline for a lot of our projects, I would say fall in that 16 to 20 weeks I think would be a pretty average timeline for that mid-sized builder project that we work on.

Kevin Weitzel: And a builder is in charge of their own destiny by getting you the content in a [00:29:00] timely fashion, by giving you the communication in a timely fashion, so you can build it with the pieces and put them all into place, right?

Cory Dotson: Yeah, absolutely. Again, we've been building websites for a long time, so there's not much that we haven't done or haven't seen from a development standpoint, so snags on the development side are a lot less common than snags on the gathering of the content and getting that provided to us in a timely fashion. It's an important part of the process.

Greg Bray: When's a website done?

Cory Dotson: Never. It's never done. There is a point in which you can check a box and say, okay, let's launch it and have it start working for us, but a website's truly never done.

There's two pieces to that. One is that it's always evolving, and the reason being is because the technology's always evolving. There's always new ways to improve the site. Not only from [00:30:00] new interactive elements that we can use to help sell your product, but also just the platform that it's on. The internet changes all the time. There's always new standards, things that need to be done to make sites work on whatever new browser comes out.

There's always something going on, but also the website, again, should be working for you as a business. It should be a tool that is an efficient tool that you use to build your business. Oftentimes, a site is launched, there's admin tools that have been built for the site to manage it, and the builder starts using those tools. It's going well, but there's little things, little nuances over time that you discovered that, Hey this could be much more efficient if I could do X, Y, and Z. That's the evolution of the website. That's what we love doing is we love for builders to come and say, Hey, can we add this piece because doing this would save us this much time, and we [00:31:00] can do it because that's how we build sites. We build them to customize it to the customer's needs.

I think there should always be a desire to discover new technologies, always a desire to make improvements, to improve the site, to keep it fresh. With that said, there does need to be a line drawn in the sand where you're like, okay, I gotta get this site launched now. Another one of the pitfalls that we see with some is that when we get to what appears to be the end of the project, there is this, oh, we can't launch it yet because we want to make this tweak, or we want to do this, or, oh, let's add this tool now, or let's change this tool, and the launch just keeps getting pushed out and keeps getting pushed out.

While all of these things that are being requested are valid, they don't need to happen before the site's live. Oftentimes, there's a site there that is way better than what's out [00:32:00] there today and could be really working hard for them. There's a lot of value in getting that site out there and running and to the public. I think too many people think that when the site's launched, it's done. So, with that mentality, they're trying to like cram everything in as quick as they can, like at the end of the project, thinking that if I don't get this in, then it's not going to be done, but that's just simply not the case. Get the site out there. Get it working for you. Reap the rewards of a new website and then continue to iterate it and make it better over time.

Greg Bray: Well, Cory, we really appreciate the thoughts and time you spent with us today. I think we've covered a lot of ground and I hope, everybody's picked up a few tips and thoughts, but just as we wrap up, is there any one last piece of advice for making this process easier or better that you want to leave with folks today that we didn't touch on?

Cory Dotson: I think the thing that I will continue to harp on because of all of the experience is you have to give it the respect and the time that it [00:33:00] deserves. You have to devote the time to the web development project as a company because that is what is going to ultimately lead to the success of getting it out on time, getting something that you're proud of, is you have to make it a priority. I understand it can be hard. Everyone's got stuff going on. There's so many other pieces to the business that have to keep moving, but you have to set aside the time and dedicate the resources to making it a successful development process.

Greg Bray: Well, Cory, if people want to get in touch or reach out and talk with you, what's the best way for them to connect?

Cory Dotson: The best way is over email. So Cory, C O R Y@bluetangerine.com.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, thank you again, Cory, for sharing some time with us today, and thank you everybody for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine,

Kevin Weitzel: and I'm Kevin weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you.