5 Things Visit Nacogdoches did with Whereabouts that won them two Destinations Texas Awards
The small town of Nacogdoches, Texas claims a few impressive titles already: The Oldest Town in Texas and the Garden Capital of Texas.
After the 2025 Destinations Texas Annual Conference, the Visit Nacogdoches team was able to add two more: First Place for Website Design & Effectiveness and the coveted Judge's Choice Award for best website overall, competing against destinations of all budget sizes across Texas.
Visit Nacogdoches is a team of three. They don't have a million-dollar budget. They don't have enterprise software licenses or a staff of thirty. So how did they do it?
I spoke with Executive Director Ashley Morgan to hear how their recent website redesign and switch to Whereabouts software platform helped them solve five key problems for their organization.
1. They fixed their bounce rate problem
Visit Nacogdoches’ old website had a big flaw: its content wasn’t keeping visitors engaged.
Ashley could see that in their analytics:
"Our bounce rate was really high. People weren't spending hardly any time on our website, and it seemed like [they] would just kind of get stuck on one page and not have anywhere else to go."
With Whereabouts powering their new site, Ashley’s team was able to encourage discovery and grow engagement by adding filterable, clickable lists of business and events to all kinds of pages. Now, when visitors land on the Arboretum’s page, they can see what other attractions are close by. When they read about a museum, they discover restaurants within walking distance.
Every listing suggests the next thing to explore, so there are no dead ends.
Visitors exploring downtown businesses discover events. People reading about azalea gardens find nearby accommodations. The site keeps people moving through Nacogdoches, both online and in real life.
2. They made it dead simple for partners to list themselves
Nacogdoches is a small town with lots of mom-and-pop businesses. These owners don't have extra staff or time to devote to learning complex listing software. So, their listings on Visit Nac’s website were often out of date.
"We have a lot of mom and pops who don't have the bandwidth to be able to really devote one person to managing their listing. Whereabouts makes it easy for us to be able to connect with them and get their information on our website."
Thanks to Whereabouts’ intuitive interface, even the least tech-savvy or time-crunched business owner can log in and make changes easily. Ashley's team gave their members a short training session on the platform, and, as a community, they turned their website into a traveller-friendly directory of all their tourism businesses. Now those businesses can update their own information. No more playing phone tag. No more outdated listings.
As Ashley put it:
"You wanted it to be as easy as an iPhone and I've very much felt like that. Everything's just clearly laid out."
3. They built a content machine with widgets and lists
Visit Nacogdoches uses Whereabouts widgets—filterable and clickable lists of their tourism operators and attractions—all over their site. Want to spend a day downtown? There's a widget showing every brick street business. Planning a history tour? There's a widget for historic museums.
Ashley found lists and widgets even helped with administrative tasks.
"Our main street department was trying to compile a list of all of the downtown businesses. I was able to export the list of downtown businesses from our widget and send it over to her."
The whole system starts with businesses listing events on the Whereabouts calendar. The listings feed their website. The website feeds their weekly "what's happening" flyers. Those flyers become posters in hotel lobbies.
"We've trained them that if you don't list it on our calendar, then it won't make it onto that flyer that everybody is asking how to get on."
4. They made their website AI-proof
It’s no secret that tools like ChatGPT are changing how people plan trips.
Some DMOs are worried about losing traffic, but not Ashley:
"A lot of people are using AI like ChatGPT and other engines to plan their trip for them rather than going to a tourism website, but I think that the most important thing to remember is you are the authority on your destination."
After the new website launched, Ashley ran some tests and found that ChatGPT referenced the Visit Nacogdoches website 80% of the time when asked about the destination.
"We are in control of the narrative about Nacogdoches and I think that's just because we have invested so much time and effort into our website and not letting anyone else become the authority on it."
When you build a comprehensive, well-organized destination website, you become the source that AI references. Whereabouts helped Ashley and her team build a pristine database of all tourism businesses in Nacogdoches, and become the authoritative source of truth for travellers.
5. They escaped the "too much software" trap
Like so many destinations and CVBs, Visit Nacogdoches started out with Simpleview. After all, it's the industry standard, and it does everything. And for Ashley, that was the problem.
"Simpleview could do too much. There were so many processes to learn and so many things that you had to run. And it just seemed like a lot of steps to get simple things done."
For a team of three, learning software built for huge, corporate event spaces was overkill. They were paying for features they'd never use and training on processes they'd never need.
"I feel like Simpleview is built for those DMOs that have multiple convention centers and multiple caterers."
When Ashley stepped into the executive director role, finding the right-sized solution was her first order of business. "I literally googled CRM and CMS and I saw the usual suspects. It felt like all of the options were just a lot more money than we could provide, or a product that couldn't do what we needed."
Then Ashley found Whereabouts and their partner website design team at The New Business: “they caught my eye as every site they had worked on was sleek, clean and attractive. It was exactly what I had in mind for Visit Nacogdoches.” A demo walkthrough of the Whereabouts platform convinced her this was the simple solution their team needed.
Right-sizing your tools isn't about settling for less. It's about being honest about what you actually need to do your job well. Whereabouts helps small teams get to where they need to go quickly.
The result
Visit Nacogdoches’ wins at the Destination Texas Annual Conference—beating million-dollar budgets and massive destination marketing organizations across all of Texas—shows that bigger isn’t necessarily better.
That's the Whereabouts philosophy in action. A team of three with the right tools can be just as effective as teams of thirty. Small teams can do great things, and simple software can lead to real success.
Visit Nacogdoches proved it. They've trained their entire downtown business community to use the platform, and they keep visitors on their site longer. When travelers ask AI about Nacogdoches, they get sent straight to the source. And when the awards came, they swept both categories.
As Visit Nac’s experience shows, you don't need complexity to win. You need clarity. The best tools are the ones that get out of your way and let you focus on what matters: telling your destination's story and serving your community.
Check out how Whereabouts is working for their website at VisitNacogdoches.org.
