TBJA 434 5 Tips To Create A Successful Website, Dennis Plucinik

Phoebe Chongchua: Hello brand journalism community. I'm Phoebe Chongchua. Thanks for tuning in to The Brand Journalism Advantage podcast. Here we go with the inside scoop on today's show, Dennis Plucinik. Dennis has 20 years of experience designing and delve developing websites and applications. Prior to founding attack, Dennis led award winning teams at New York City's biggest digital ad firms, including huge RGA and many others. Dennis has designed and built enterprise products for clients, including Disney, Nike, target, Morgan, Stanley, HBO, and more. He specializes in user experience, design and front end development. Welcome to the show. How are you?
Dennis Plucinik: I'm doing great.
Phoebe Chongchua: So I'm excited to have you because this is just ongoing. You know, the curiosity that people have when they're building websites because there are so many options now and it does seem like it's gotten a lot easier. You know, it's the, the big players in town. I'm talking about sites like your Wordpress, you've got your Joomla, what else do we have? Squarespace. We have a lot, right?
Dennis Plucinik: Drupal. Yeah, for sure. Squarespace, wix.
Phoebe Chongchua: So many choices and you know, brand journalism community. This is what this show is about. It's all about creating a successful website from a design perspective. Dennis knows this all too well and he's going to tell us what we should and maybe even what we shouldn't be doing with our websites. Because you know, [00:01:30] if you want to put together a website and you get too caught up in at Dennis, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong on this. Sometimes you make some big mistakes because you're only looking at it through your eyes.
Dennis Plucinik: That's totally true. I think that there's one rule we impress on our clients is that you are not your users and it's a really hard mentality to break from it because you think you know everything about your company that should be said to people, but they don't. It's hard to put yourself in their shoes where they don't know who you are and they don't know what services you provide and they may use their own language. So, so we try to say, let's just research, let's look at what the users are and what they expect, and then communicate the way that they're expecting to be communicated with. So yeah, you could absolutely get, you know, in in the middle of the forest and
Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah, and I love that because a, you know, former TV journalists research is at the heart of everything in the storytelling and you know a lot of people do try to sort of sidestep that. Just thinking, no, I got all the details. This is what I want up there. But they're not really thinking about their audience. So we're going to go through those tips and we're going to dive into that a in our top tips section. But we always kick off the show with an icebreaker and I think this is interesting. You started an international Ebay business at the age of 16 what was it? How'd you do that? What were you selling?
Dennis Plucinik: This is such a funny story. I was selling handmade didgeridoo and did not actually end up going over well with a couple of cultural groups in Australia. But the long and short of it was that I have seen a friend of mine, I never be finished reduced to a didgeridoo before, but it's seen a friend of mine play one
Phoebe Chongchua: asking me to say, tell me what is the Didgeridoo? And just in case I'm, you know, I can see it, but you know, maybe there's people going, what is he talking about?
Dennis Plucinik: If you've, if you've ever seen those old Foster's beer commercials, the Didgeridoo is that like droning sound in the background. So I'm not going to do it, but it's based, it's made out of wood two and traditionally it's made out of eucalyptus tree. This held up by termites and it's painstakingly cleaned up and scraped out in tuned and painted by a aboriginals in Australia. And that's one of the things that they've done for a millennia and it's a part of the sustenance of their culture, which I didn't realize it 16 I just thought I was making a cool instrument. So I, you know, I learned how to make those out of PVC. I made them for like four or $5. I sold them on Ebay for 50 or $60 and I spent a lot of time painting them. I was a fine artist in high school so I did a lot of hand painting and try to figure out the designs that people liked and actually did some split testing on my own work and I ended up doing that for a few years. That was pretty fun. But I can't really do that. When you go to college there's no, there's no space. I was doing that in my parents house to had a big shed in the backyard. I do that again.
Phoebe Chongchua: Alright. Okay. Well I knew there had to be some story there so that's really cool. Yeah,
Dennis Plucinik: people usually look at me with a cross eyes like what is it?
Phoebe Chongchua: What'd you say? All right. If you are doing that right now, brand journalism community while you're listening to this, make sure you got to think like a journalist.com and we will put a photo, maybe even a video of the sound it makes, I'm a former hula dancers, so there's all kinds of, you know, equipment, Uli Uli which of the feathered gourds and things like that. But when I would say that as a kid, people would be like, Huh, what are you saying in English? Yeah, exactly. Okay, so this is relevant. It's what we started off talking about at the top of the show about websites and I just want your weigh in on this quote. It goes like this. A website without visitors is like a ship lost in the horizon. Yeah. There's, there's another
Dennis Plucinik: Funny quote above just blogging is a, never before have so many people had so little to say it. It's so few people.
Dennis Plucinik: It really is all about the audience. It's how to get your message in front of people. It's otherwise [00:05:30] you could just paint a picture and put it on your wall in your own home. It has the same level.
Phoebe Chongchua: I love it. I love it. All right. Share with us a meaningful success quote or a tip that you'd like to leave with our community.
Dennis Plucinik: Well, I want to say the thing that's driven me and not to any, any conscious effort of my own, I think this is just how I'm wired, but I've never stopped working, learning, trying, believing in myself and, and just trying to move forward. There's never been a thing that I've looked at and thought that's an obstacle that I can't get past. So you know, at least think about, think about it like water, I guess I flow around all of the obstacles. You have to find a way through and if you persist, you will move forward. So that's the thing that's driven me is just that no matter what, and there always will be obstacles. You just don't stop.
Phoebe Chongchua: You know? That's really motivating because a lot of people, they run into these obstacles and they, they just stop. Maybe the first one doesn't stop him, but you know a couple more and they just think this is too hard. It's not worth it.
Dennis Plucinik: I think part of it is how you identify with failure and you can either identify with a failure personally and say I'm the failure or you can say that thing failed. Let me learn from that and not do that again.
Phoebe Chongchua: Love it. I agree with that whole heartedly. You know, I, I think your background's interesting. I think the things you've been involved in, you, you have so from the the workout side of it, because you run a pretty fast mile I think. Right?
Dennis Plucinik: I have gotten, I haven't gotten up to six minute mile. Yeah. Wow. Not in a regular basis but when I'm motivated I can,
Phoebe Chongchua: I can hit that and that Kinda just goes along. I found, I find at least that a lot entrepreneurs or people in general who work out and exercise, you know, they bring to the table that energy that, you know, like an endorphin high. Like when I'm spinning and I get off the bike and I go, I just, you know, I could go work now. I've got all this creative
Dennis Plucinik: Janine chills just thinking about it. It is purely a tick.
Phoebe Chongchua: Love it. Love it. Will take us to, you know, take us back in time and fill in any blanks that I've left out of your career and then take us to that moment in time that's considered your career highlight. Sure. So
Dennis Plucinik: long story short, I've been working for as long as I can remember. I think even back in middle school I heard a friend of mine had a job. I said, well why can't he come over and play? He goes, he's got a job. Like I want a job. So I went and got a job. I started working on a farm when I was 12 and fast forward through working on a farm, working on a paper route. Actually don't fast forward too far and so I was 16 a friend of mine sold a website to a zip Davis for something like no, no multimillion dollar deal. I think I was 18 years old and I saw what just happened. Like I was working on a farm a second ago. Now this guy is driving Lamborghinis and he's 18 I got, I got to do something around that and that I got the bug and I was a, I was in fine arts at the time in school.
Dennis Plucinik: Photoshop came out, Internet came out and I was hooked, so started making websites and 16 selling on ebay at 17… I’ve just not really stopped doing that since then. I've gone through college. She went to school at University of Buffalo. I worked myself through college doing freelance web design and worked at a ecommerce store in buffalo as well. I moved here to New York in 2008 spent six while the following six years working through many of the top ad firms that you mentioned at the beginning and making a lot of great connections and meeting incredibly talented people. The last firm I left, which I won't name was [00:09:00] basically the the end of what I think was a a bad culture for me. I'm starting to realize that they were, a lot of these companies were set up just to burn out young people and take advantage of them. And I saw that as a failure somewhere up along the chain that everybody who is a technician at the end, designers and developers, we're basically paying for by having to work nights and weekends.
Dennis Plucinik: And I thought that's just pure theft. I mean, I had a family, I have a daughter, I want to spend time with her rather than not be staying up all night. As much as I'm proud to do it. There's this hero culture that that [00:09:30] environment bread. And I always thought that it was excluding people who were older basically, who had other more advanced priorities and they couldn't compete with someone who just had nothing else to do but work. So I decided at that point I wanted to start this company and do things right. So eight months later we hit $1 million in revenue. And that was, I think my career highlight is still gives me chills to think about that fact. So it's a, it's a proving ground and that if you do things right and you do respect people's work and surround [00:10:00] yourself with smart people, then you can succeed. Now we're not a thousand people like some of these big firms, but I don't think we have to be in order to have an enjoyable career and a fulfilling career.
Phoebe Chongchua: Well, I think you've already proved that. Right? That's fantastic.
Dennis Plucinik: I love, I love what we do. I'm very proud of all the work that we've done and we have some fantastic lines.
Phoebe Chongchua: So now I'm going to ask you to flip it and talk for you. You kind of went a little that way, but I'm going to push you a little deeper to go into that when it didn't work moment and share a story about that and [00:10:30] what you learned from it. Really dive into the experience.
Dennis Plucinik: Sure. So we, you know, nobody tells me what to do everyday. There's nobody guiding me and saying, this is what happens next. Here's what you should do tomorrow. It's all just figure it out. Try it. Trial and error. And we've, we've done many things that we've, I guess errs out on some hypotheses that we had initially where that we could hire people who didn't have a lot of experience and we can train them to do things what we thought was the right way. And that was, I think in hindsight, it kind of an arrogant approach because we've weren't looking at them in terms of what they saw of the future of their career. Maybe this is just a stepping stone, it always had done for me. So, you know, why wouldn't it be for them? So if we spend all this time trying to train people and then they just left and all of that work just disappears a, on top of that, we grew very quickly.
Dennis Plucinik: So in the first six months I had a partner at the beginning and [00:11:30] six months later we had 20 people and I was going around telling people like, we have, you know, two people, five people, 10 people, 15 people, 20 and everyone looked at me like, that's crazy. That's incredible growth. But really we weren't growing the right way. We were hiring people who weren't really qualified to do what we needed them to do. And when the growth started to reach a certain point, that process that we hadn't really refined started to break down. So we brought the team back down to a core of I think four or five people who are only actually still with us. And we've grown out slowly since then. So we've focused on hiring people who have a huge amount of experience or a very a self guided, they're professional, there's no ego.
Dennis Plucinik: And so that we don't need someone to babysit everyone. There's, we have one manager, we have one producer, it's a total rock star and everybody else is just in their own right. Fantastic. And they're inspirational to me, so I don't have to worry about everybody doing the best work because it's the culture that we've curated. And so, you know, it's through the sort of growing pains that frankly, it was the worst part of running a company and having to fire somebody. I'd never want to do that again. And so I'm burned from that and I'm now slowly making sure that we hire the right people.
Phoebe Chongchua: That's such a great turnaround story. You know, I think I work in the recruiting space too with companies and I can see when some companies are just overly eager to bring on people because they're ready to grow and they're ready to rock and roll with it. And you know, they've got that energy, they've got dollar signs too, because that did that. That growth will represent more income coming in, more revenue. But sometimes that surpasses whether or not the candidates really the right candidate, they're just overly eager. And that's painful.
Dennis Plucinik: Right? Right. And especially when you have somebody who comes in with very strong, uneducated opinions and it starts to affect the rest of the culture. When you have people with 20 years of experience feeling like they're being undermined by somebody who really is just shouldn't be there to learn, but as, but it's very cocky. And honestly I was the same way. So I understand. I just thought that at that time when I was maybe 25 it was so easy. And I don't, I didn't see why everybody else thought it was so hard and I was just so gung-ho and energetic and five years later my energy level is cut in half and I've got half as much time. And you know, technology is four times is complex. So…
Phoebe Chongchua: Yes, 25 that's a good number. It was sleep for three days straight. I remember it. I was anchoring the morning news and I think I was staying up till two and had to be on the air at six and know, hey, I'm 25 right, right. Craziness. Well let's go, let's dive into this because I know that I kind of want to check, we've done episodes like this in the past Brand Journalism community where we talked about building websites, but you know, technology changes, the rules changed, the algorithms change. So looking for a quick update, you can always find other episodes@sinklikeajournalist.com but we're diving into five tips on creating a successful website. This is coming from a design perspective. So go ahead and take us through Dennis.
Dennis Plucinik: So there's a couple different practice areas that I think are important to focus on. In our company, we do full stack work, which means we bring clients through from strategy to design to development to deployment and maintenance and marketing. So along each of those steps you have choices to make, which impact the overall product. So when you're talking about things like user experience, what that means is more of what it could mean is that we're starting to talk to the users and figure out what they want of this, this product, how do we communicate to them? So the rule there with user experience design is to be empathetic. Whether users watch them, actually asked them, define them, give them names, say this is what, you know, Jane, the accountant would use this financial application to solve and and understand that it's not just you trying to communicate what your product does, but why would that person actually use it?
Dennis Plucinik: So, you know, so being empathetic to them is a, is a very first step. Understanding who we're communicating to a and why when we get into visual design, we can start talking about things like [00:16:00] creating character and character or bringing some brand essence. But it starts to compete with things like known patterns. And when users like we are and and this year have been using the internet and different forms for so long, you tend to expect things to happen. Like an underline is, you know, traditionally a blue link. It's not that way anymore, but it generally, there's some indication that there are affordances in the interface that if you break you will confuse the users. So you have to define what your character is and how to make your site in Europe experience unique, but balance that with your appetite for breaking from convention. So there's, there's a bit of a sort of two for there.
Dennis Plucinik: You want to think about how to communicate uniqueness, but you also have to consider balancing familiarity and novelty. And there's a lot of things that drive me insane on websites when to companies will scroll [00:17:00] jack the, the desktop experience. And I can't actually scroll up and down. So the one thing we learned to do the mouse button, you scroll it and the page should just call. If it doesn't and it does something else, then you've just broken the contract with your user about what they expect to happen next. And so as a result they're less likely to interact with your site because they can't trust that you haven't broken other conventions as well. So you have to be very careful about that. And it's a highly technical thing to be able to balance that tactfully. A lot of awards sites will, we'll award websites that are just overly flashy but not necessarily that usable.
Dennis Plucinik: So we are on the side of functionality and making things usable so that it actually does the business requirements that as opposed to from a development, which I think choosing your platform and understanding the technology options you have is really important. This is probably one of the biggest things that that we see with clients who don't really know where to start and they say, well we've heard of wordpress but this other company is suggesting that we do something on, you know, ruby on rails. And they don't really know the difference. Nor do they know that those two technologies are entirely different. So we try to help communicate what technology is appropriate. So I would say it's important to do your research about that. So you can, you can have that conversation if you're not informed at all, you're going to be in a very bad position. And then ultimately it has whatever the solution is has to be simple. You can't, we can integrate a lot of different services, but you should choose one thing and make sure that you understand that thing very well. So that kind of goes back into user experience design as well. Keep it simple, don't make things too complex. The more you have to manage, the more likely you are to find some error, a screw it up.
Phoebe Chongchua: So let me ask you a question about that. Platforms wordpress a still very popular, right? Is, are there certain professions are products that are better for that?
Dennis Plucinik: So we, we focus on individual solutions for or individual products for specific solutions. So for ECOMMERCE, we're generally using Shopify for content sites and we're generally using wordpress. We also build applications in react so you can tie all of them together. In some cases we've paired wordpress [00:19:30] and Shopify. In some cases we've paired wordpress with react to create some pretty interesting solutions, but wordpress itself is traditionally a blogging platform, but it's evolved into something that's much more comprehensive. We've built some really interesting tooling on top of that that allow us to build more robust interfaces very quickly and gives the control back to the business owner. So if you need to change something after the fact, you can just use wordpress for that. There isn't like a brand of wordpress or a proprietary wordpress thing that you could buy. You can buy themes. We don't use themes, but we're presses the underlying platform that I think 25% of the Internet is built on.
Phoebe Chongchua: And then what about those of us in the podcasting space? Obviously that's content. Would you say wordpress is good and do you have a suggestion for running your podcast through it? Like what are you using?
Dennis Plucinik: We're presses were press is really good for managing any type of content. So podcasts, do you have audio content? Obviously [00:20:30] podcasts require you to syndicate that content across different distribution channels just to get more, more of an audience. But to have a centralized brand I think is is important for any podcast. It's the podcast itself is the brand. And for podcasts they're not super in terms of presenting, not on a website. So you could get away with using word press with a theme for that and not have to pay, you know, an agency to build a bespoke experience. And even, I think a lot of the, it's, it's a very popular podcast or are not doing things very, very robust. There's some, like Sam Harris says, podcasts where he's got a lot of other things going on. There's a, there's a meditation APP, there's a behind the scenes content, there's, you know, there's actually an application there, which I think is a result of them having such a large following, but until you reach that level WordPress's more than sufficient.
Phoebe Chongchua: Excellent. Well, I love what you've shared with us. Brand journalism community. The tips will be in the show notes@thinklikeajournalist.com [00:21:30] it's time now though to ask you, Dennis, you've been hired to help an ailing company that's about to financially collapse its reputation shot. You have a month, a thousand dollar budget, a smartphone, and a laptop. How do you begin to turn this company around?
Dennis Plucinik: Just write content, write as much content as you can, publish it everywhere. The the biggest thing that has produced success for us is getting our story out there. So I'm making some assumptions here. If you're a good story writer, not that you're going to hire a great copywriter for $1,000, [00:22:00] but if you have that ability and you have that compelling story, tell that story until it everywhere and ask everybody to amplify that and have a clear CTA. What is it that you're calling people to do? What's the call to action? So if you want people to sign up for your service, make that to clear a CTA, but, but put content out there, there are so many channels to distribute content on. And if you know, if you could go back in time, spend some time building up some profiles on those platforms instead of just coming out of nowhere and publishing it, but that's going to be the best use of time. $1,000 is not going to buy you a lot of Google ad words. It's not going to buy you a lot of Facebook ads. It's not going to buy you enough to turn the story around the ship around, but that type of content, the written content, it's awesome. If it's authentic and compelling, we'll live forever. It's articles that I've written over 10 years ago. There is still up and getting hundreds of hits a day and I forget about them, but they are an asset basically.
Phoebe Chongchua: [00:23:00] What is one piece of technology, video, multimedia equipment or an APP that you just can't live without?
Dennis Plucinik: My Aura ring is the thing that I came across last year, say an activity tracking written kind of like a fitbit, but I'm not a bracelet so it tracks my sleep. I think that primarily tracks my sleep and I, I've been working towards optimizing my experience with regard to getting better quality sleep helps me think more clearly and operate better. So I look at the data, I go back and change my behavior. I don't drink coffee after 10 for example, or I don't go do a big exercise before going to bed or try not to look at my phone. I definitely do still look at my phone at night, but I try, I try not to.
Phoebe Chongchua: I try to affect change. That's my challenge too. And the other thing that I found worked for me, at least for sleeping is changing the time that I was taking some of my vitamins, like my B vitamins or co Q 10 that type of thing was taking him to too late in the day and it was even vitamin D and it was sort of stimulating me. Or then if you took Melatonin at night, it was, I think vitamin D can interfere with that. The absorption of it. Yeah. Yeah. It's really fascinating. But I switched those up and it's been helping a lot so
Dennis Plucinik: well I was always taking vitamins in the morning, so I'll just make sure not to take it away. Yeah, don't, don't take 'em in right.
Phoebe Chongchua: One book, documentary blog podcast or Internet channel that you'd like to recommend.
Dennis Plucinik: I want to say that it's fascinating, but it's also very important to stay up on it. Anything that's AI related or machine learning, we're kind of automation based. There's a couple of good podcasts, data skeptic, linear digressions talking machines. They have regular content about this, but also any podcast that has somebody speaking about Ai. I think it's worth going after. There's just so much change happening and I think the impact of this technology is going to be revolutionary.
Phoebe Chongchua: Yeah. I just read something about a gender neutral AI voice or something like that and was on the headlines today. It is fascinating what's happening and credible expert predictions. Years, 2025 when I started this podcast, a couple, two, three years back, we were further away and we are quickly, quickly closing in. So give us some thoughts on what it will look like, maybe the landscape of websites and what we should pay attention to and then leave us with some parting advice to build a competitive advantage.
Dennis Plucinik: Well, I think in light of the, the Ai Revolution, we've already seen that we can very easily become victim to that on platforms like Twitter or Facebook become basically echo chambers for our own opinions. So it was very dangerous there. And I think to, if, if society will recognize that and call for greater control over those manipulative and addictive pieces of functionality or even business models, then then we'll start to see change. So I don't know if that's going to happen that soon. I mean 2025 is like right around the corner. So there is a movement sort of to internally to [00:26:00] account for that. And people will vote. I know with their actions, if they've flee Facebook because they feel like they're being taken advantage of, then Facebook will change, you know, and then so on the side of content, I think people are going to more likely seek out Austin publicity as a result of things becoming more automated. You have things like Buzzfeed and Twitter bonds and this is less a authenticity on those platforms. So things like podcasts are literally two people speaking and you can't really fake that. You kind of can actually, there are some AI technologies that will fake audio, but you know, I think that it will become more important to be authentic. So,
Phoebe Chongchua: or the AI news caster, I can't remember which country that came out of, but you know, few weeks, few weeks or months back that I posted on Facebook. It was, it was frightening. I'm glad I'm not the news anymore. Right. All right, let's close out the show. I don't know if you like wine, but a, it doesn't matter. Where do you dine in? Play wine, dine in play. Give me one place.
Dennis Plucinik: So Kura in the East village is a very nice place. It's a small Japanese restaurant or like 12 seats, sit around a bar. Very traditional Japanese style. If you've ever seen that movie, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, it's very much like that. Super intimate. But also more importantly for me is that I love Sushi and the food is fantastic, but the chefs are are right there. They're right in front of you. They're smiling, they're greatly skilled, and they're, they're showing this joy. There's, they're literally having a great time doing the thing that I think they, they love to do. So it's just a great vibe, a really nice place.
Phoebe Chongchua: Dennis, thank you so much. This has been great. I love what you've shared with us on The Brand Journalism Advantage.
Dennis Plucinik: Oh, you're welcome. Thanks.