Not sure if your website's working for you? Let's talk it through - coffee locally or a call, no time limit.
Not sure if your website's working for you? Let's talk it through - coffee locally or a call, no time limit.
There's a version of this story going around at the moment, and it always sounds the same.
A business owner decides to build their own website. They use one of the AI site builders, or they work through it with ChatGPT. It takes a few weekends, then a few more. Two months later they've got something that looks pretty good on screen.
Then they wait for the enquiries. And nothing happens.
When someone finally takes a proper look under the bonnet, the reasons are almost always the same:
Two months of their own time, and they're back at the start.
I want to be clear about this, because the conversation online gets very tribal very quickly.
I use AI every day. It drafts, it speeds things up, it takes the grind out of a first version. Someone in one of these discussions put it better than I could: a WordPress site doesn't become professional just because it was built with WordPress, and an AI-assisted site doesn't become poor just because AI was involved. They're both tools. The tool isn't the variable.
The variable is whether the person driving it knows what a website has to do.
AI will happily give you what you asked for. It won't tell you that you forgot to connect the form. It won't ask who your best customers are, or why the last five people chose you, or what happens on the page after someone clicks "get a quote." It won't warn you that your service pages are all one page, so you'll never rank for any of them. It doesn't know your business, and it isn't accountable for the result.
Anyone who has worked with a decent designer or web person has sat through the annoying part: the twenty or thirty questions about your customers, your competitors, your process, what you actually want the site to do.
That part feels like admin. It isn't. That part is the work.
It's where you find out that your customers don't care about your "20 years of experience," they care that someone answers the phone. It's where you find out that half your enquiries come from one suburb and none of your pages mention it. It's where the difference between a nice-looking site and a site that brings in work gets decided.
A website produced in sixty seconds skips all of that by definition. It can only reflect back what it was given. If it wasn't given a strategy, it can't build one for you.
It's not just websites. I keep hearing from designers who are being asked to "fix" AI-generated logos, usually once the business hits a wall trying to use them.
The file isn't print-ready. It doesn't scale, so it turns to mush on a shirt or a sign. There's no vector version, so it can't be reproduced consistently across a website, a vehicle wrap and a business card. And there's a risk most people don't think about: because these tools are drawing on existing designs, you can end up with something uncomfortably close to a brand that already exists, without ever knowing.
It's the same lesson in a different format. Something can look like a logo without functioning as one.
Here's the part I actually want you to take away, because "you should have hired someone" is not useful advice to anyone who has already spent two months on it.
Most of the time the site doesn't need to be thrown out. It needs the missing half added. Run through this list before you do anything else:
That's not a complete audit, but it will catch the failures that cost the most.
A website isn't a digital brochure and it isn't a piece of art. It's a working part of your business. It has to build trust with someone who has never met you, explain clearly what you do, be easy to move around, turn up when people search, and make it obvious how to get in touch. Then it has to keep doing that while you get on with your actual job.
AI can help with a fair bit of that. It can't own the outcome. That's still a person's job.
If you've built something yourself and you're not sure whether it's working, send me the link. I'll have a look and tell you what's actually going on, what's worth fixing, and what you can safely leave alone. No pitch, no obligation. Sometimes the answer is three small fixes, and I'd rather tell you that than sell you a rebuild you don't need. If you also want to know whether AI tools like ChatGPT can find you, that is a separate piece of work.
