Growth and Expansion of the Monolithic.com Website

April 7 , 2005

by David South Jr

We started our first website in 1996. It was only one page under someone else's Internet domain name. Later that year we purchased our first domain name -- monolithicdome.com. Over Christmas vacation I hand-coded in Windows Notepad our first useful website. It would receive a few hundred hits a week and we thought it was fantastic -- ironically most of the hits were probably from us. Rebecca South is in charge of our website today. My role is to keep the technology working while Rebecca, Kris Garrison and Freda Parker manage content. Changes are made almost daily, to keep up with the Monolithic Dome business. We receive millions of hits a month now. As I've watched our website grow, I am amazed at how it changed our business. The world wide web is the most powerful, customer-driven marketing tool ever invented.

Business-Driven Marketing

In 1997 we were running little ads in magazines like Popular Science and Mother Earth News. About 100 calls a day came from these ads. As we started printing our web address on these ads, a curious thing happened -- our calls dropped off. At the same time, our response through the website rose very slowly, maybe one email a day.

It took us a while to understand what was going on. Before the web, customers would mail or call us for more information. We would send them a free brochure. It takes time to do this. By the time the brochure reached them, they may have even forgot they ordered it. Or it answered their questions and they are not interested. Only a few would want to know more. So for every phone call and brochure sent, maybe one in ten were actually interested in learning more.

This is a classic example of business-driven marketing. A business receives an inquiry and sends an educated guess of what the customer is looking for. The business now owns the customer's name and address and could inundate them with junk mail whether the customer is interested or not.

Customer-Driven Marketing

The web reversed this process. Potential clients read the ad, surf to our site, answer their own questions, and they decide when and how we would be contacted. It put all of the control in their hands. Sometimes we will receive an order from someone we've never heard of but who has spent years reading our website.

This is the essence of customer-driven marketing. The customer decides how and when they will contact us. More importantly, we had to build a comprehensive website to answer their questions or they leave and never come back.

Print is Dead

In 1997, we also started a color magazine version of the Roundup. I ran it as editor for four years. We did a lot of good work and hired a great staff to do the job: Freda Parker, writer; Kris Garrison, assistant editor; David Collins, art director; and all of the staff at Monolithic, too.

Rebecca came on board in 1999. The website was becoming too big and needed full-time attention. Our workflow was to write articles for the Roundup and then Rebecca would task those articles for the website.

The Roundup cost a lot of money and time to produce. It was also repetitious.

Every quarterly issue basically said the same thing. It had to. Print magazines must stand on their own and make sense without requiring the readers to own every issue. So while we covered some subjects very well, there were important gaps in our information.

In 2001 we did an analysis of how well the website was doing. It was shocking how much it had grown in four years. Every day the website received as many visits as the Roundup had subscribers.

More digging in our database found that our best leads, the ones with actual jobs pending, came directly from the website.

We realized that the website was driving the Monolithic Dome business, not the Roundup.

So in the Summer of 2001 we ended the Roundup. We received more than a few letters of complaint about this, but it was the right decision. We needed to focus on the web.

New Paradigm

It took us a while to get used to the new paradigm of publishing for the web. Do not believe, even for a second, that the web is an electronic version of a printed magazine. The workflow is entirely different. Everything we did had to be revamped.

It took time, but we feel we finally got it down. Today, Rebecca is in charge of the content and day-to-day management of the site. Kris Garrison is our "nexus." She gathers information from David B. South, the sales staff and manufacturing personel and confers with Rebecca. Next, she and Freda Parker write and edit articles and forward the completed information and any images needed to Rebecca. I spend a lot of time worrying about whether a data or power outage will knock the system off-line.

After ending the Roundup, I was under the mistaken impression that our web traffic would drop. It didn't even blink. In 2001, the website received about 750,000 hits per month. By 2004, it was up to 4,000,000 hits per month.

In September 2004, four hurricanes hit Florida. Our web traffic increased daily. But when Mark Sigler, NBC reporters, and National Geographic Explorer crews spent the night in Dome of a Home during Hurricane Ivan, the website delivered 10,000,000 hits in four weeks.

This is the underlying power of the Internet. Although the NBC reporter didn't say in his broadcasts where you could find information on the dome hit by the hurricane, a simple Google search found us immediately. What's even more interesting is that the server for Dome of a Home went down because of the storm. We were able to post updates from the Sigler's on our website which people could see immediately until the Sigler's website came back online.

Dome Interest Growing

A web "hit" means nothing without comparing it to the past. That could be said about the Monolithic Dome business, too. The web and the Monolithic Dome have grown in parallel to each other. It used to be when you talked about webs, it meant spiders.

Or when you talked about domes, people thought of the Epcot center or hippie communes.