Podcast: Maintaining a Strong Home Builder Website – Dennis O’Neil

Dennis O'Neil

This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Dennis O’Neil of Oneil Interactive joins Greg and Kevin to discuss how important maintenance is in creating a strong and successful home builder website.

A website is essential in home builder digital marketing, but the true success of the website is in the updates and additions. Dennis says,

“…with technology, it’s not just about building a solution, it’s about maintaining a solution. It’s about making sure that it works next year, next month, on the next iPhone, that it’s compatible with the next watch, the next version of Chrome doesn’t blow it up and make it stop working, right? Like, all of those things come into play.”

Home builders must consistently revise their websites to better fit the needs of home buyers and to adjust to new technology. Dennis explains,

“…the website is never finished. It is not. Customer expectations don’t stop getting bigger because you press the launch button on your website. They’re constantly looking for something different, and there are better ways to do things. Sometimes there’s a better way to do things because we learn something different about consumer behavior, or there’s a better way to do things because consumers have been trained by a popular behavior that this is the way things are supposed to happen, and we need to be able to accommodate that workflow. Everything else doesn’t stop changing around it.”

The progression of a great website happens continually over time. Dennis says,

“So, we normally try to encourage them to phase things in, which also involves an acknowledgment that we’re going to keep building. We’re going to build the site. It’s going to launch and then we’re going to keep going, and we’re going to go into phase two and then phase three and phase four, and we might add in a 3.5 and a 2.7, and then whatever comes along the way. But it’s, thankfully, I think getting more and more common to understand it’s a forever process. It really is.”

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about home builder website maintenance.

About the Guest:

Dennis O’Neil is a leading Internet sales and marketing thinker and doer with 20 years of building industry experience. Dennis founded ONeil Interactive to realize a more perfect customer experience after nearly a decade of leadership with a national builder. Guiding builders through markets with high-ROI strategies, ONeil Interactive has grown into a creative website design and marketing powerhouse. Dennis has authored two books and countless articles discussing his insights on how technology has impacted the sales and marketing processes and professions.