An AI tool puts together a nice website in a few minutes, but it gives pretty much the same one to everyone. What makes a website bring in customers is that people find you, understand you and can write to you easily: the tool can’t guess what sets you apart.
Simon FortinFounder of JustSimpleWeb
A complete, good-looking website, online before you finish your coffee.
Three weeks later, your phone hasn’t rung once.
A website before you finish your coffee
You need a website. The budget is tight, and so is the time.
You try an AI tool. Three sentences: your name, what you do, your city. The tool takes care of the rest. Polished images, text that holds together, colours that go well together.
Honestly, it looks great. Nicer than what you could have paid for with that budget.
You put it online before you’ve finished your coffee.
Three weeks of silence
The first Monday, you wait. The second one too.
You type your trade and your city into Google. You don’t show up. Your competitor does.
You click on their website. Same layout as yours. Same images. Almost the same welcome sentence.
So you ask the tool for corrections. One in the evening, two the next day. Every touch-up undoes another. The time you thought you’d save now goes to your website instead of your business.
The photographer at the wedding
Think of the last wedding you went to. Everyone was taking photos with their phone. Good photos, too: today’s phone does better than professional cameras from fifteen years ago.
Yet the photos people frame are the photographer’s.
They don’t have a better tool. They know what to look for: the light, the angle, the second just before the smile. Things the guests don’t even think about.
Your website is a guest’s photo. The AI did exactly what you asked. The problem is everything you didn’t know you had to ask for.
What the tool couldn’t know
AI repeats what it has already seen. If nobody tells it to do otherwise, it gives everyone the same website: nice, and beige.
Your business isn’t beige. There’s a reason your customers choose you over the business next door. Your way of working, your story, that detail nobody else does.
No tool can guess that reason. It takes someone who takes the time to find it, then puts it forward.
AI doesn’t know either what your customers are really looking for in your area. You won’t find that on the Internet, you see it on the ground.
And a nice website nobody finds is the tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. Did it really make a sound?
What changes
A website designed by someone who knows what to look for isn’t built first to look good. It’s built for three things:
- that people find you when they search for what you do;
- that they understand in a few seconds what sets you apart;
- that they can write to you easily, at the right moment.
It looks good too. But that’s no longer its only job.
Who’s holding the phone
AI is an excellent tool, and the pros use it too. The difference was never the tool. It’s who is holding it.
Does your website look like a guest’s photo? We can look at it together.