Meet Dr. Samuel “Ross” Patton, M.D.
Position/Practice: Physician at The Center for ENT in Houston
Years in Practice: 7
Education: Medical Degree and Residency at University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston
Dr. Patton, your practice has been through a few web builds in the last couple of years. Why did you initially decide to redo your website?
We started looking at a new web build in late 2019. Our website hadn’t been updated in 15 years. We wanted to add video, and update it with more modern services.
I know you had an outside firm build your website initially, and then ultimately decided to work with Fuel. Can you tell me a little bit about that process?
We had three different marketing companies talk with us about their web services initially. We ended up going with a local company. We liked that they had a well-defined process for their web builds. They also laid out a comprehensive digital strategy for us with short, medium and long-term goals, and they had an emphasis on video. That build took about six months to launch.
We were pretty happy with the initial website, but we were paying $1,000 a month to host it and any changes we needed were $200 an hour with a 2-hour minimum. The pandemic was just starting, and we needed to make regular changes to our website to keep patients updated. We were also looking at adding a facial plastic surgeon and a dermatologist to the practice and adjusting our website to include those services would have incurred a lot of additional costs. Fuel’s hosting fee was substantially cheaper than what we were paying, and changes and upgrades were free, so we transitioned over and had them build us a new website. They were able to use a lot of the videos we had already filmed, and we had already reviewed and written a lot of content for the first site, so it was a relatively easy transition.
As you know, because Fuel’s priority is overall practice growth, our web services are not as expensive as many private companies. Did Fuel’s low costs impact your perception of our quality before you started the build?
There was some concern about quality initially. I don’t have any concerns about that now. I like the website Fuel built us better than the one that the more expensive agency created. It’s hard to determine overall growth from the new site because of how COVID has impacted our numbers, but we are seeing about 45 appointment inquiries from our website each week, which is certainly more than we used to get.
Do you have any advice for practices that are considering redoing their website?
Start by figuring out if your website is holding you back from achieving what you want. If you’re in a saturated market like Houston, unless you’ve built recently and are continuing to upgrade it, you’re almost certainly falling behind. The website itself is fairly easy but time-consuming. I found that for content within my specialty, I wanted to write it because I’m pretty picky. I would recommend that level of investment to help your services stand out. As with most things, the amount of time and energy you put into your new build will really influence the final product.
