091: Websites That Convert: Development, Design, and SEO Success with Santi Schamberger (Office Hours) 

Episode Transcript

Danny Gavin Host

00:05

Hello, I’m Danny Gavin, founder of Optage marketing professor and the host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today, we welcome Santi, who has helped design and develop high-impact websites and SEO campaigns that drive real results. His approach is all about collaboration becoming an extension of our clients’ teams, deeply invested in their success. Today we are diving into web development and its role in digital marketing and WordPress websites. How are you doing, santi? I’m doing really well. Can you share your journey into web development and what inspired you to get into that area of marketing?

Santi Schamberger Guest

01:04

My whole life. I always loved marketing. I always loved the idea of helping businesses grow and succeed, and I also wanted to build my own thing. So I started thinking about different projects that I wanted to do, and I didn’t have the resources to hire someone to build a website and to do the design for me, so I started learning a little bit how to do it myself. Then my projects didn’t go very well, but at the end of that I started thinking okay, what’s the outcome that I can get from all these experience and things that I’ve been doing?

01:45

And it was that I learned how to build websites and I liked that and I enjoyed it. So I decided to push it a little bit more and to start doing courses and to become better at what I do, and that’s why I decided to go with website development. I started doing courses, I started working with different clients as a freelancer and I started becoming really, really good at website dev and I enjoyed it a lot. And at the same time, there was the pandemic hits and everyone needed a website. Everyone needed to be online. So that was a really big push for me and I started working a lot more, improving my skills, and that’s how I ended up here.

Danny Gavin Host

02:29

What do you like most about working in an agency setting rather than just being a freelancer on your own?

Santi Schamberger Guest

02:33

That I get to share my work with the team, to receive feedback, to have someone that gives me their opinions, that ask me questions that make me think, people that I can learn from. For example, since I joined Optige, it’s been really, really great for me because I get to see how other people work, what they think when they look at the website, and that changes my vision and that’s what I like the most. And also, when we work in an agency, the clients are very different, so you get to understand how each industry thinks, what they want, what they look at, and you get to learn and to see how other people do what they know best, and it’s all experience that gets to your mind and allows you to grow and to think better right.

Danny Gavin Host

03:36

So what are some of the biggest challenges you faced as a web developer and how do you overcome them?

Santi Schamberger Guest

03:40

To align expectations and to explain to the client that we need to build something that looks really good but that also converts. So a good website is a website that converts, not the most beautiful website up there, and at the same time, you get to get aligned with the marketing objectives. So it’s hard as a website developer to understand the client needs to build something great and also to align it with SEO or marketing or paid social in order to build something great. Once you learn how to talk with the client, how to explain them what you are trying to build and that sometimes what they want is not the best thing that they can get in order to achieve their results and their goals.

Danny Gavin Host

04:30

So I don’t think I’ve ever told you this story, but this must have been. It’s one of the first clients that I worked with. It must be back like 2012, 2013. They got this design company, purely designed to create their new website, and I told them okay, like, if you want to rank for SEO, we need to have some words on there, right? We can’t just have these big pictures.

04:49

What they ended up doing was they had, like, above the fold was this really big picture? Maybe a couple lines of text, and then you had to scroll. I’m trying to do I know you don’t know inches, so millimeters, I don’t know like 15 centimeters down, and then they had started the text. So it was like a picture, white space and then text at the bottom, and it was so horrible and ugly and it was so hard, because the designers that I was working with you know, from their perspective, there was no middle ground. It’s like for it to be a good design, it just needs, you know, it has to have minimal text, and then, if you want to add text, well, we’re going to hide it somewhere at the bottom, and I remember that.

05:29

What ended up being? Is it actually? It looked so horrible, it looked like a mutant right Like different things, and yeah, so that’s just one of my funny early memories of like design, but not necessarily doing what’s best for the client, rather just doing, you know, a pure designer. So I always say, like, designers, web developers and SEO right really have to find a common ground because, yes, you need to create a beautiful website, but if you want it to rank, if you want it to convert, sometimes that means you do have to give in to some of the other things and it can’t just be this beautiful, you know, artistic masterpiece, some of the other things, and it can’t just be this beautiful, you know, artistic masterpiece, exactly, exactly.

Santi Schamberger Guest

06:11

Yeah, it happened to me a lot. Uh, when clients provide, it’s the same when they hire uh at the same design agency. They send you the uh designs and they are incredible, they are beautiful, but then it’s hard to convert those designs into an actual website because they never. To convert those designs into an actual website because they never. They don’t think about okay, how, and this is also what I think how, what dev is evolving right.

06:34

So before you got an agency that would do the design for you and then you’ll have another team doing the website development, the issue with that was the designers and it’s not their job, but they don’t know how to translate that into an actual website. And when you receive the design as a website developer, you immediately know that some of the elements that are designed there cannot be done or are really hard to achieve or that they will affect the user experience, because you know how to build them. So it’s like all the different elements when it comes to a website. They have to be really synchronized. The work should be really collaborative. When the designers are done, the design can actually be converted into a website and that it will actually achieve the results of the clients.

Danny Gavin Host

07:29

So you’ve been doing this for a long time pre-COVID, throughout COVID and then obviously all now through 2025. How has your approach to web development evolved over the years?

Santi Schamberger Guest

07:38

Yeah, it changed a lot because technology has been changing a lot these years. Because technology has been changing a lot these years, there are a lot of new tools, a lot of new things that you can use to make something better. If I look back to when I started, I used to use a lot of tools in order to build a website, because the tools before weren’t that big and full of functionalities. Right now, we use two, three tools to build our website, and that’s really really good and it makes everything way easier because the tools have become really complex, really good at what they do, and they are merging multiple tools into one. That allows you to build something great with minimum tools.

08:22

And then, as I said before, I think my vision when it comes to web dev has changed a lot, because before it was enough for you to know how to code a website or how to design a website or how to do SEO. Right now, it’s important to understand the three things. You need to understand how to design a website, how to code a website, how to code a website, and you need to have some idea of SEO. Otherwise it’s hard to build something great. But I think it’s happening in most industries that different roles are emerging that before, for example, you could do a website without knowing any SEO, because they had an SEO team. Right now, it’s crucial for you to understand all the pieces as to build something right.

Danny Gavin Host

09:06

So, with all these tools available now, do you feel like this means there’s less room for, like, web developers and people can just do it on their own, or do you still feel like it’s a good idea to get a web developer to help you?

Santi Schamberger Guest

09:19

For me, it’s still a really good idea. The tools are super powerful, easy to use and they provide great outcomes, but at the end, you need to understand what they are doing, like the structure behind it. For example, tools like WordPress, webflow, that I like to call them low code. They are easy to use, but you need to understand what’s the mechanism behind them in order to do the right changes in order to work well with them. I think that a web developer, web designer, are crucial. Still, it’s true also that the AI is making it, or reducing the amount of people that you need to achieve the same result, which is something great, because more designers, more developers, are able to do more and better designs and better work. But I still and I don’t think it’s going away soon. I still think that a web developer and designer are important.

Danny Gavin Host

10:21

Yeah, and I say the same thing with SEO where you know, these days you would like to go to ChatGPT and just type in hey, can you do SEO on my website? And this is the website. So it’s very easy to, let’s say, get the outward sort of result, but if you don’t understand the logic behind it, then often you’re not going to be able to diagnose problems, fix it, or major issues. A good example is we don’t have to name the client, but we’re working on a project right now where, like their WordPress is a mess, right, but because you have a good understanding of how everything works in the backend and how things are built and how they’re built upon each other, it’s very easy for you to go in and actually work with a horrible built site and make changes and updates, when someone who just knows like the surface level would never be able to go in and get it to work, and we know with them they had a very hard time like updating and making things.

11:10

A push moving forward is for everyone. It’s really easy to get surface level knowledge, but if you truly want to understand something, you have to go back to the basics, you have to build up your knowledge and then, yes, you can use the ai or the other tools to help you, but if you just start from here, there are going to be many scenarios where you’re going to be totally lost and you’re not going to be able to provide true value, 100%, yeah. So can you describe a project that you’re particularly proud of and what made it so successful? So, like, when you look back at your experience, is there one project, man, that was the best one?

Santi Schamberger Guest

11:43

So I had a client in the culinary industry. They were selling courses online. We use Clarity, which is a free Microsoft tool. What it does is shows you the heat maps of your website, so what a visitor does when they visit you, and it’s really, really important to see, because sometimes you see how they click on certain elements that are not clickable, or that they don’t scroll up to the section that you need them to scroll, or the behavior that they do is different to what you expected them to have.

12:19

So we took all those metrics, all that information, and we improved the design. After two months of launching the new design, their conversion rate was up 30% when it comes to form submissions and schedule calls. For me, when a client is successful, it’s when the client actually tells you hey, you changed my business or you helped me grow and you helped me achieve my objectives. That’s, for me, my goal with all of these, and it happened with that client and it made me really, really happy. And that’s the purpose that you should have, or that I have, behind what I do to see other people happy or excited about working together, about getting results about growing the business.

Danny Gavin Host

13:09

That really resonates with me because I think you know the fact that we really change people’s lives and I know sometimes it’s like a business, but you know when we’re actually able to make a change and see people are happy and, you know, potentially change someone’s life from having something that doesn’t work but now it does work and they can provide for their family, it’s pretty amazing. So we don’t always get clients like that, but you know, when you do have those clients and you’re able to know how you affected them in a positive way, it really means a lot.

Santi Schamberger Guest

13:36

Exactly exactly, and that’s also what I like about marketing is that if you do well, your client do well, and if they do well, you do well. Do well, your client do well, and if they do well, you do well. So it’s like a virtual circle there that it’s a win-win situation for everyone. So everyone is pushing the same way. We’re doing our best for you to succeed, and if you succeed, we succeed. So that’s what really motivates me and what keeps me in this industry right.

Danny Gavin Host

14:03

So, based on what you just said, user experience is really important. So I imagine you know if someone came to you and said, hey, you know my website’s ugly, it’s not working so well, design me a new website. Not necessarily the first thing one should do, right, it’s possible that maybe the designs, like in general, it’s not so bad. It’s just maybe, by doing a couple changes here or there to make things easier, that could actually be a better option. So I think a lot of times web developers will come and say, hey, you need a new website, but maybe you aren’t right, maybe it’s just a matter of looking at that user experience. So, from your perspective, what role, how important is that user experience and understanding it in order to make a successful website and also a successful marketing campaign?

Santi Schamberger Guest

14:46

Yeah, for me it’s crucial to have a good website. As you said, the first thing that we should do with the client is and that’s why I really like and enjoy working in OptiG is what’s the best for the client. Obviously, for a web developer, it’s always best to rebuild the entire website and do it from scratch and do it great, but sometimes by tweaking some of the things that they already have there. It’s enough. So that’s the first thing that we should consider. Then, having a good website, and a strong one. It’s crucial.

15:17

The website itself is the foundation to all the other marketing strategies. So if you do social SEO or any of the other kind of marketing, they will all land on the website. So having a strong website with good copy, leading the user to take the action that you need them to take, is super important because otherwise, all the other efforts that you do when it comes to marketing if you take the visitor to a not so strong website, you’re going to lose a lot of visitors and a lot of potential clients. So for me, it’s crucial to have a really good website so you can have everyone come there and get the conversion.

Danny Gavin Host

16:03

So I know we touched upon this a little bit earlier with my story, but can you speak to the importance of finding a balance between optimized copy and an attractive web design?

Santi Schamberger Guest

16:13

When it comes to websites, for me, the design is great as to catch the attention of the user, so you want them to go to your website and say, wow, this is a good website. This looks good, but then the copy is what should lead the visitor to take action. The design should follow the copy. It’s not. Otherwise you cannot have a really extremely beautiful website and the copy not so worked that it doesn’t help bring the user where you need it to be. For me, it’s building the copy is crucial and then building something around that will catch the attention, but it’s not very weird or strange or a lot of movement of elements, so the user don’t get distracted. That’s crucial. But yeah, if I would say something is, copy is the most important thing and the design should follow the copy, because the copy is what takes the user to the to take action so, would you say if you were designing a website, ideally you should have that copy first and then you can design it around it.

Danny Gavin Host

17:19

Or is it okay to like have placeholder text and design?

Santi Schamberger Guest

17:23

You can do it both ways, but for me the best is to have all the copy, all the structure, and once you have it, you plan a good design around it. That’s the perfect way of doing it. Sometimes I work with some clients that say, santi, build a better website, use placeholder images and text, and then we will work on it once you finish the website design. That’s not, in my opinion. That’s not the way to go, and sometimes it happens, for example, that I build a slider that has one sentence per item, let’s say, and then the client works on the copy and they send me, for each slider, two paragraphs of text. So then we need to rebuild the design in order to fit that text there. So, yeah, it’s always better to have the copy, to have the structure and to have the vision and the goals of the clients and then build something around that that helps achieve the results.

Danny Gavin Host

18:21

Yeah, and then the design is more custom, right, because then you actually fit it to the different elements. I think that makes a lot more sense. So at Optage we use WordPress and many oddities.

Santi Schamberger Guest

18:32

As you grow, it has a lot of plugins that you can connect to a lot of integrations with different CRMs, different tools. That allows you to manage your client base, your emails, anything. WordPress is really well connected. We liked it a lot. It’s easy to use, easy to manage and then, as I said, if you want to add more functionalities in the future, it’s totally doable. So for me, it’s the tool to use when building a website. There are Webflow and other tools out there, but for me, I always prefer WordPress. It allows you to create a really, really complex, full of functionalities with incredible design websites. At the same time, it allows you to build something quick and fast that looks really good on all devices. So for me, wordpress is great.

Danny Gavin Host

19:35

How do you approach the customization of WordPress themes and plugins for client needs?

Santi Schamberger Guest

19:38

The first thing here is to understand the client goals, what they want to achieve with their website. And when it comes to the technical stuff, we like to use Elementor. It’s a builder that allows you to create really good interfaces easily. It’s extremely powerful and it has a lot of add-ons around it that allows you to add more functionalities, so it’s great. When it comes to the theme, we use mostly Hello Theme, which is a theme built by Elementor’s team, and it works incredibly well with their tool, with their builder, and it makes the website really, really fast because it’s just a blank theme that you customize using Builder. Those two combined are our go-to plugins and themes to build the websites. I will say that 90% of the websites could be designed and developed only using Elementor.

Danny Gavin Host

20:33

Some of the complaints, at least in the past, that I’ve heard about WordPress is you know, if I’m going to get someone to custom design it, then if I need to make changes I’m going to have to go back to them. But one thing that people have to realize is when you build a website in Elementor, it’s very easy for someone to go in and make changes and updates here and there. I mean, obviously, if you’re looking for a totally new custom module, that’s different. But to go in and to do updates, just the user interface, in addition to just being able to build it, but then to be able to maintain it and update it, a client has a lot of flexibility, would you agree?

Santi Schamberger Guest

21:04

100%. Yeah, you no longer need a website on a per e-house to do any change, or most of the changes can be done by the client itself. It’s really easy to go ahead and change the text, change images, create new pages. Then there are a few things that are more complex and where you would need help, but the easiest part, you can do it yourself. That’s a mistake that I see on a lot of companies, mostly before, not not currently. Currently is very well known that elementor and other tools make it really easy to build the websites, but they would use WordPress and create a custom theme inside WordPress based in PHP, and what that does is that removes the possibility of the user to modify the theme easily. So it’s like you’re using WordPress but you’re losing a lot of their purpose, which is making websites easier to maintain and manage. But, yeah, using WordPress and Elementor will help you have a really fast, good looking website that you can maintain by your own.

Danny Gavin Host

22:13

Whether it’s true or not. Some people say, like if you add on Elementor, it makes the site really heavy, the page load is going to take a long time and we know from an SEO perspective, ideally we want our pages to load really quickly. So what do you tell people who say I don’t use Elementor because that’s actually going to make my site really heavy and slow that?

Santi Schamberger Guest

22:32

was a reality some time ago. But now they updated everything. They cleaned up their plugin and it’s really lightweight and really good. They changed a lot and really good. They changed a lot. If you would say that to me three years ago, I would agree and it was really. It was still a really powerful tool. But if you looked at the code, at the loading speed, it was an issue and it happened to all the website builders before. Nowadays it’s really optimized really good. We know it from our experience. We built websites in Elementor. They are really fast loading, they look really good and they are really easy to use and if we check their page speed and their SEO results, they are doing awesomely. So yeah, it was an issue in the past, but it’s improving really really well now.

Danny Gavin Host

23:29

Yeah, and I’m going to just throw out there that one of the things that we used, or a plugin in WordPress called NitroPack, which has been a very good speed plugin for any website on WordPress that had page loading issues, things like that. This is a plugin that’s really helped us speed things up without having to do a lot. So just throwing out there that, if you are having page load issues, getting a plugin like NitroPack can really make a difference. So, outside of custom themes, what other common mistakes do you see businesses encounter when using WordPress and how can they avoid them?

Santi Schamberger Guest

24:00

The biggest mistake that I see is using a lot of plugins. We have worked on some websites that when we jump in we see 60 plugins installed. The biggest issue there is that when plugins get updated, they may lose the compatibility within each other. If you update them all, they may lose the compatibility within each other. If you update them all, probably the website will break. So the less amount of plugins that you can have, the better. I understand that sometimes you need all those plugins in order for you to work with the. We have Spot and different tools that you use or, for example, gravity Forms, which is the form builder that we usually use. To add each functionality to Gravity Form, you need to add a plugin. So you end up having 12 plugins related to Gravity Forms and sometimes that’s what’s increasing the number. But yeah, that’s the biggest mistake that I see, apart from having a custom built PHP theme that it’s not very easy to manage.

Danny Gavin Host

25:01

Are there any go-to plugins or features or functionalities that you feel like every WordPress site should have?

Santi Schamberger Guest

25:07

First of all, the website should be 100% responsive, or mobile first, as they call it now. Secondly, they should have at least three plugins. Which is a really strong SEO plugin, such as Yoast RankMath or All-in-One they are really really good tools. Then they should have a good optimization plugin for speed. As you mentioned, nitropack that’s an incredible tool, but there are also other tools that are really good, such as WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache. There are really good tools there and then another one for security.

25:48

Warfence is the most known one, which is great. There are other good alternatives and when it comes to performance and security, most of the hostings do include that on their packages. So it’s smart to see okay, this is the hosting that I’m gonna use, what they provide in terms of security and optimization, and see if you still need more security and more optimization. Need more security and more optimization for speed or not? Usually, security is covered by the hostings, but then the optimization plugins that they provide are not enough, so you should still have an optimization plugin in order to make things as fast as possible.

Danny Gavin Host

26:33

A big issue with WordPress is people not updating the plugins and themes. Do you think it’s good to have, like, a plugin which automatically updates things, or it’s important to manually update your theme? Manually update your plugins in case something goes wrong?

Santi Schamberger Guest

26:46

In WordPress you can enable auto updates, so everything. When they receive a new version, it auto updates. However, I think manually updating them is the smartest thing, because when you update a plugin, the smart way of doing it is updating one by one and testing the website. If you have, let’s say, 12 plugins and they all need an update and you update every one of them at the same time and it breaks, then it will take you a lot of time to understand, okay, which one broke the website. However, if you do it one by one, you instantly understand what’s the issue and you can fix it. Or you can leave the old version there until they fix all the issues that the new version has, and then you can update it. Having everything updated is super important. Doing it manually is the best way to go, and then comparing how the website works before and after that date, that’s also great.

Danny Gavin Host

27:44

I mean, bottom line is a WordPress site does need some maintenance and some upkeep. So why do you still tell people to go to WordPress when maybe going to somewhere like Wix or Squarespace where they don’t really have to worry about things like plugins and updating things? And they don’t have to worry about plugins and updating things and they don’t have to worry about that. So why would you still tell a small business owner or a small company it’s better to go with WordPress?

Santi Schamberger Guest

28:08

I see Wix, squarespace are really easy to use and you can build something quick, simple and faster and the maintenance there is really really low. But if you want to have a really custom design with custom elements, with more functionality, something that looks really yours and not like any other website in the internet, wordpress is your way to go, or custom websites. However, custom websites, you need a dev team to manage them. So, in the middle of custom and fully coded websites are really simple ones done by tools like Webflow. Webflow is also really good, but, like Wix and Squarespace, I choose WordPress in the middle because it gives me the best of both worlds. I can have a really well-designed website full of functionalities while having a really low maintenance. That’s why I always pick WordPress.

Danny Gavin Host

29:07

Good answer, and I know you mentioned Webflow, being a good designer, but from an SEO perspective, I’m always going to tell people to stay away because naturally, wordpress has so many functionalities to create a really good, seo-friendly website. Webflow, we found in our experience it comes with a lot of issues and it’s not as easy to manage from an SEO perspective. So stay away from Webflow.

29:28

A couple of minutes ago you mentioned a really important point which I didn’t think about talking about today, but I think is an important point that we should end off here is about the hosting. So a lot of people they’ll buy basic hosting from GoDaddy and have their WordPress site hosted there, but really at Optage and in general we push that you should get premium hosting that’s specifically created for WordPress sites. So, like, what we push is a host called Kinsta, but there’s other ones out there like WP Engine and, like you said, there’s a lot of bells and whistles where they’re doing a lot of security and monitoring on their backend, automatic backups and really optimizing the hosting specifically for WordPress, and you find that when using those sort of hosts there’s a lot less problems that you’re going to have rather than going for like a cheap, $4 a month hosting at GoDaddy. So any additional thoughts there about how important the hosting provider is, specifically for a WordPress site.

Santi Schamberger Guest

30:21

I will copy you here Stay away from GoDaddy and Bluehost for hosting. Yes, they are the cheapest solutions and they are easy to start working with. However, they are not great. I never, never, recommend using them. I always prefer something like, as you say, kinsta is really good. Their performance optimizations are great. If you want to be great. The website is really good. The overall interface is awesome. Same with WP Engine and same with SiteGround.

30:57

Those are the three ones that I would recommend using, and yes, they may be a little more expensive than GoDaddy and Bluehost, but in the long run, it’s always to have your website secured. They have automatic backups, they have a lot of tools that help you, in case you make a mistake, you can recover the website and everything is there for you to go back or revert back any changes. And also, their support is really good. It happened to me several times that when I tried to contact Bluehost support, it took me hours to get a proper answer. When it comes to SiteGround or Kinsta, you start the chat there, you have a person talking to you, they help you and it’s great. It’s worth it spending a little bit more to get a really good service.

Danny Gavin Host

31:47

That’s so important because we used to use HostGator back in the day and, oh my God, to just open up a support ticket it took forever, and the fact that you can go into Kinsta, open up the chat and actually speak to someone pretty quickly and get their help is huge. You don’t understand just that itself. It’s like buying a life insurance policy. It’s a little expensive, but when you need it it’s there. So that’s really really important. Santi, if I could summarize what we discussed today is that WordPress is a really great option for a website. It’s very customizable. Is WordPress is a really great option for a website? It’s very customizable and with builders like Elementor, it allows people to go in and actually make changes on their own, which is really good. Of course, you still need to update it and upgrade it, but honestly, most websites are like that. But even though you have that portion, the fact that you can create something really flexible and also extremely SEO friendly should outweigh the cons of having to do some of these updates every once in a while. But once again, if you have that really good hosting environment, they’re also doing a lot of the security and watching and making sure that nothing will happen to the site. Exactly, exactly like that.

32:56

Santi, thank you so much for joining the Digital Market Mentor today For our listeners. If you’d like to explore Optic’s web design and development services, check out our website. We’ll include the link below. Santi, thanks again for joining us. We’ve loved the fact that you are a part of our team. It’s really opened up so many new opportunities for us to really get up. Like you said, everything’s connected, so even our SEO is better, right? Because when we have web design in-house and we’re able to talk, it’s been really wonderful. So thank you for being a part of our team and for joining me on the podcast today.

Santi Schamberger Guest

33:28

No, thank you very much for the invitation. I really enjoy working with Optidge I’m learning a lot and that’s what I want to do, so thank you very much – it’s an honor to be here.