If you’ve ever heard the saying “it’s like a builder’s house” (meaning it’s often less spectacular than anything they’d do for their clients), this definitely rings true for website designers, too.

I’m as guilty as any professional – after doing so much for a customer’s business website, the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is check on my own. But don’t take my behaviour as exemplary!

The customer comes first

I’m constantly reminding my clients to check their hosting, CMS platforms and plugins are up to date to guard against security issues, to check their backup schedules are chugging along and their site’s looking great on all sorts of different devices.

I also tell them to update their site content.

As you might have noticed, jellydigio isn’t exactly regular with the content. It always seems to be on the to-do list, and never on the done.

That’s because I’m busy working for people who are paying me and their needs come first. It’s just good business sense that my priority is giving my utmost attention to my customers and making sure their sites are as beautiful as they are secure.

But this is a business. My business. So every now and then I have to eat my own dogfood (another really quite disgusting saying).

Good for humans, good for search engines – website content

Content is the lifeblood of your site, the stuff visitors engage with.

A well-written article can not only provide a landing page or drive sales, but give you benefits that far exceed what you might expect from a bunch of alphanumeric characters and images on a web page.

The reach and functional pull of content is staggering and can give both good OR bad outcomes for your company.

A website visitor can be inspired, excited, alarmed, annoyed, driven, bored, emotive, active, all or none of the above. They can put their faith in the source of that content, or be entirely put off.

This article is some content. Posting it on my website it will help with some or all of the below:

• Make my website look “lived in” – people don’t like a website that looks dormant, it might be wasting their precious time.
• Give search engines “fresh meat” – algorithms like Google search have an interest in making sure their results aren’t out of date, and of course some customers do like recent results. If you want to be found for a certain keyphrase, it’s helpful to have it throughout your site in a natural manner.
• Increase trust between me and my customers – I am a real person, with thoughts and feelings, not some kind of faceless bot churning out scammy rubbish. I also seem to know what I’m on about.
• Increase my reputation as a website content creator alongside my web design skills – if you want someone to hire you for what you do, you’d better show them you can do it
• Allow me to link to other parts of my own website AND the wider internet, making my site a part of a larger map – not a cul-de-sac, but service station on the information superhighway!

It all takes time, and though you might not believe it from the push to integrate AI into everything and replace everyone below C-Suite with ChatGPT, it is actually worth spending time and even money on. It’s worth getting someone who understands the value of you, your business, and the right way of doing things.

I do not recommend content written by machines, and now I’m going to tell you why

Yes, ChatGPT and other LLMs (so-called A.I.) might save some people some time on some tasks. But I cannot stress enough: writing for your business website is not one of those.

You ask an LLM to write your company “about” page. It returns a bland, factually incorrect mess. You spend more time fixing it than you would if you had just written it out.

Sure, ChatGPT can sometimes help people with suggestions of what to include, in broad terms, on a particular page. But it doesn’t know you. It’s not a team member. It does not have any of the things you do. It has no particular feelings about making you look smart. Or keeping your customers safe.

Maybe a human should be involved!

Content creation is something that shouldn’t be left to chance, which is what the dreaded AI mulch machines are built on. Yes, chance: a set of statistical algorithms that say stuff like, “B usually follows A”.

I like to call it “Mr. Average”. It looks for words that are most probable to come next based on what it has ingested before, and outputs that. Even if it’s a load of crap.

It’s like taking the pub bore whose favourite things are just exactly what everyone else’s are, you know the one, that guy who always makes up lies to impress people, that real dodgy guy who no-one trusts or likes – then letting him run roughshod all over your firm’s reputation.

Sigh, I get it. A lot of people are very invested in making this work. What can I tell you?

Yes, it’s a very big and very advanced set of algorithms, but “intelligent” it is not. It has no creative or innovative thought. It has no empathy or sensitivity.

And AI created content can’t be copyrighted in some places. So nothing you create with it belongs to you.

Even if that doesn’t put you off, the chances are that if you don’t watch it like a hawk, it could say something libelous or even sexist or racist to your customers. Unlike, say, a trusted employee or contractor.

What sets your business apart?

Besides, Mr. Average has very little in the way of style, or accuracy, or understanding of datapoints outside its statistical sets. Where that’s an issue for you is if you believe your business has any Unique Selling Points at all (and hopefully you do). If you are doing it differently, or better than everyone else, then B will not follow A for you. If you’re the only one who offers what you offer, then how could Mr. Average cope?

In a nutshell, if your company matters to you, why would you trust what customers see of it to a system that is effectively autocomplete on steroids? Especially when these systems suffer from a great deal of privacy and security issues?

Perhaps I’ve proven my point?

So anyway, how about hiring an award winning author who happens to also know a great deal about websites to write your content? 💅

Of course, I’ll schedule some more articles on this blog in the near future, but first I’ll have to find the time…

No rest for the web devs.