So What? Summer Makeover Series: Generative AI for Web Design

Well, hey everyone, happy Thursday. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I'm Katie, joined by Chris and John. Hello. There we go.

Oh, got it. Uh John is on location today. I know, I know. I feel like I'm in the I need to get Jack Bauer to rescue me from this terrorist situation here. You know, or just, you know, a shared work co-location.

Or you know. Uh this week we are continuing our summer makeover series because who doesn't love a makeover? And it's summer. And so we are, you know, taking the opportunity to not only show you what you can do with the uh new and improved generative AI tools and techniques, but also how you can take stuff that you already have and just improve upon it. So this week we're doing generative AI for web design.

And uh because it doesn't matter, we're using my website. Mostly I have a website so that nobody else can claim my name as a URL. And then we decided to put some stuff, some stuff on it, and it sat there quite literally for a couple of years, just collecting dust with some random pictures and text on it. And then people started finding it. And now we figure we should probably do something with it.

So that's what brings us to today's episode. Uh, and how we're going to use generative AI for very basic web design. Um, you know, I don't think that this replaces a proper web designer, especially for a larger site, but where my site is essentially a brochure with a few simple pages, I think this is totally appropriate. This is a great use case for generative AI. So, Chris, where would you like to start?

Uh well uh you know where we're gonna start. I know where we're gonna start, but I want to hear it from you. We're gonna start with the five Ps. We're gonna figure out what is your site supposed to do. So let's take a look at it real quick here.

This is KatieRobare.com. Right? Um, and this is some nice stock uh art of an espresso cup, some random plant and uh and uh uh I think that's supposed to be a Mac. Uh if it is, it's got the wrong number ports on the lower hand side. Um I don't think anybody notices besides you.

No. Um, and that's I mean, this is it. So it's using the 2025 theme, which is uh the stock out of the box uh WordPress theme. We've got some basic stuff here. Uh, but this is it.

This is this is getting site. So what is this supposed to what is the site supposed to do? So the purpose of the site, at least from my perspective, is so I don't have a business or a side hustle outside of trust insights. So essentially, I I would imagine that the purpose of this site is to give people more detail around who I am and what my services are within Trust Insights that you know you can't necessarily get from our website without making uh the Trust Insights website, the Katie show because it's supposed to be collectively the company. So it's an opportunity for me to really expand on my expertise.

Um so people can understand, like, oh, that's a problem I'm having. Let me go ahead and hire Katie via Trust Insights. So it's an extension of our services, it is it's an extension of our about us. Um, you know, with the goal of someone wanting to bring me on to consult with their company. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, consult their company in in any number of fashions from the bespoke consulting to coming in to do a training or workshop uh with somebody to even you know, acting as a fractional CEO. If if you somebody you need like, hey, we just need someone to write this ship and and and get things the direction it's supposed to be going. That's really the business goal for this. So, given that, what we want to do is then figure out well, what would that involve? How does how do things like design and content and stuff reflect that?

So I I will I pass it back to you just to for your your hot take. And actually, I'll I'll pass it to John for your hot take because you sell a lot of consulting and stuff for trust insights. When you talk to our buyers, and they're talking specifically about like AI strategy. We have the new AI uh ready marketing strategy kit. John, what do people say they need to know to hire to hire someone like Katie?

Yeah, it's a great question because you know they if they take the resource kit, those get thrown into two buckets, right? There's the people that are just gonna try and do it themselves versus the ones that are trying to figure out what's out there and you know where can they go and they're not interested in doing it, or they know that their organization is big enough that they want to have somebody who's already done it, like they don't want to climb the learning curve. So I the best approach for this is to make sure that there's enough resources out there that showcase what KD's done and you know what kind of services we provide. Really just get as much stuff out there as you can. And I kind of go back to that old UX um adage of it doesn't matter how many clicks, as long as people know where they are and can get to where they want to go.

So it's not about like cramming it all into this website right here, but more appropriately, having it set up so that it's like, okay, if you want to figure out what Trust Insights does and what KD does there, here's how to get over there. If you're just want information on Katie, find out more about her, then you know, LinkedIn profile might be one of the branches where you want to go. So having, you know, a list of all the possible things and then you know, determining whether those stay on site or just get redirected to stuff that's you know updated more frequently. Um, but that all that stuff rolls up into the purpose. Yeah, okay.

So what we should do first is we should probably commission a deep research report. One of the most powerful tools for all of us, if you're paying for any AI tools, so open AIS Chat GPT, uh, perplexity, clawed, Gemini, doesn't matter if you're paying for it, you've got deep research capabilities. And these tools are so much better at researching things than uh than we are, because well, frankly, we can't spend, you know, 20 hours just looking at reading through 170 different websites to figure out what what the best practices are. A lot of people, uh and I know this is gonna be something that you know we'll have arguments about on LinkedIn. A lot of people like to crap on best practices and say, Oh, you'll never differentiate yourself.

Like best practices are a minimum level of competence. It's like you're if you're not even competent, best practices will get you there. And and so I think that's a good place to start. You know, it's and without getting too far off topic. I really I feel like best practices are just a set of expectations.

Um, you know, and so obviously, a best practice for me is going to be different from a best practice for John, different from a best practice from Chris. If you take the example of working out, a best practice is to warm up ahead of time. Great. What does that mean? It's gonna look different for me as a woman who has certain mobility issues versus John, who for some crazy reason runs almost every day, versus Chris, who's also a casual runner, but maybe has you know different physical makeup than John.

Like you guys are obviously different heights, so like your warmup is gonna look different. So the best practice is to warm up. What you actually do is gonna differ case to case to case. Exactly. So here's how you do it.

This is one of the easiest ways to get started. You would start by opening up your take your you know, opening up your phone, start a voice memo's app, and yell something like this. Uh just in the air, I have a CEO who has her own website, Katie, right? She's the CEO of Just Insights. We know we spend some time.

Well, who is Trust Insights? What do we do? Katie's goal for her personal website is to attract workshop and consulting gigs. She wants to attract high value clients to hire Trust Insights to do AI governance and planning and strategy with her and the rest of the team. Secondarily, she wants to be able to teach full fee workshops, you know, $25,000 a workshop for Katie to come in and teach you what you need to know.

Her ideal customer profiles are people who plan workshops for companies, C suite executives who work at you know mid-size and large companies who who need the kind of AI consulting that she can deliver. She just created the AI uh ready marketing strategy kit, right? Which you can get at TrustInSize.ai slash AI kit totally free. Um we can include a copy of that in in this later on. So we need to redesign this website to reflect the kind of clientele that Katie wants to attract.

And we need to think about things like messaging and design and graphics and fonts and color schemes, all those things that influence our our decision making process subtly or obviously, right? Like hire me. A big button says hire me would be one of those things. Um we've got a lot of information, right? We've got top podcasts and YouTube videos and stuff.

We've got a live stream every week. Um we have tons of downs. We have Katie's LinkedIn profile, we have all this stuff. Katie's the pioneer of the 5P framework, right? So we want to feature that on the website uh and things.

And so I did exactly this. I foamed at the mouth for for quite some time to write all this down in transcript. And then what I did was I fed it into Google's Gemini. And I said and and I took uh your LinkedIn profile, the AI ready success kit, right? Uh, and that long prompt.

And I said, okay, build me a website redesign guide for Katie specifically. And of course, yeah, it came out with 27 pages of uh recommendations for design for the content you should have, the typography, the imagery, the graphics, and all this stuff that yes, I could have done myself. I did not have time today to do that. No, and if you know, it's we say this a lot. It's easier for someone to react to something than it is to sometimes create net new.

Because one of the questions I would imagine would naturally come up in this conversation would well, do you have a style guide? Do you have a tone guide? Do you have a you know a brand for Katie Robert? And the answer to all of those things is no. Uh, because I've because I have it for the company, I don't know what the extension of that is for myself as a brand, you know.

So, you know, I would struggle and I would just kind of spin wheels and waste time. But you already have something put together, and I think that that's fantastic. Yeah, so it says here um the dominant color should be a deep, sophisticated blue, nay, the Oxford blue, Prussian blue that establishes an immediate foundation of trust, stability, and corporate authority, sticking that the services offered are serious and reliable. Very, very buttoned up. Yeah, that but again, that's something I'm like, no.

I would say if you take the green color palette, you know, so that would be my first thing. The rest of it I think is fine, but like because the grays and the off-whites, but I would say instead of the primary palette being uh a deep sophisticated blue, I would go with a deep sophisticated green. Uh, you know, so that would be like you know, a hunter green, for example. Um, and then the rest of the foundation is, you know, varying shades of that. Yeah, hunter green, forest green.

That to know me as a person, that aligns more with who I am versus a blue. Okay. So we've got the green there. We've swapped that in. We have typography, uh, a classic serif font, body text, highly legible sans serif font, like Lotto or OpenSans, a type typographic hierarchy.

So this is a really good general layout. So our next step should be an audit. So the easiest way to do an audit is let's fire up an instance of good old-fashioned regular Google Gemini. Let's go to Katie's website. And all I'm going to do here, very, very simply is I'm going to open up my snag it utility.

I'm going to record a region of the screen and say, let's record this. Turn on screen recording. And scroll, scroll, look at the blog. That doesn't work. It does work.

There's nothing on it. So that that's kind of a problem. So there's the about page for Katie. There is this blog, which so the links at the bottom uh are there. And let's look at the contact.

There's a croissant. Nice. Kind of goes with the little coffee thing. It does. And so now we've got a video.

So our next step is to say using the website design guide attached. Evaluate the website's actual design shown in the video. So we're going to take the video file. And pull in Katie's actual uh aspirational guide, and we're going to say, score the site based on the different components of the guide. Zero to five.

That's zero. Five is the uh best alignment, and zero is the worst. Tally up the scores and present a final score. Explain each score. So we're essentially turning the style guide into a rubric, uh, a scoring rubric, so we can get a sense of well, how well does Katie's site accomplish its goals?

Now, you might say, can't you just feed it the HTML? You can't. And the reason why is that language models will read HTML like language. They cannot see from HTML, they can't render it on their own. So you have to, if you want to cover things like the graphic design, you have to provide images.

They can understand that better than HTML itself, uh, which is not intuitive to us as humans, but that's how they work. It because you're right, intuitively, we would be like, oh, it can read HTML because code and it's a machine, like it feels like it should be able to do that. I am totally, you know, it's I can't even take offense uh to the scoring because we've put zero effort. I sorry, we I have put zero effort, maybe like a tiny little bit, just to make sure there was something on there that it points back to trust insights. But yeah, I'm actually surprised it scored as high as it did.

Yeah, I mean it wasn't a zero. It wasn't a zero, pat yourself on the back. Take the win today. Take the win. So we have uh foundational positioning score of one, zero on core messaging quiz zero on offering structure, one on IP, zero on content strategy, uh, two on layout and aesthetics.

Good job. Woo. Uh one on information architecture, final score. Uh this is okay. This is a completely the required.

This is why we're here. Yeah. So the next step is for us to say, okay, well, that's a lot. So where should we start? What's the highest priority item or top three things we should do that will have immediate impact and not take more than a an hour to implement.

We're gonna be we're gonna be real uh real aggressive here. Like yeah, this is this is worse practice by the like actually please do take your time give me the easy stuff, easy important stuff. Yeah, no, you really want to, you know, think through your ICP. You want to make sure that you know you have a real brand guide, you want to really go through the five Ps. And you know, you may need to bring on an actual web designer.

This could just be like a first draft. We were um last week on the live stream, we were looking at some things that we were like, oh, this would be a great first draft to bring to a designer to help explain, or a videographer to help explain what the idea is versus them trying to interpret large bodies of text. So you could use it this way. We just happen to be using it as the final product because again, my website really just needs to point back to trust insights. Mm-hmm.

So priority one, fix the first impression, home page, headline, and image. Says AI strategies, leadership, not just technology. I think that actually is is really on the money. Okay. What do you think?

Or do you like transforming a business with governed AI? I hate anything about transforming. All right. So let's take this and go into your site. Let's go to the pages.

Let's go into the home page. Do a quick edit just on on that headline. And save. All right. Implementation number one is done.

That's it. Three points. Ching ching ching. Uh-huh. Another thing that we should do is we should say what what features in WordPress are, because this is a WordPress site, what features are we not using?

Right? It's a very sophisticated system and we basically just got in the car and said this is a car. I wonder what it does. One of the easiest ways to do that is to say uh I'm going to give you the WP options table from the site. So you can see what's installed, what's not, and what features we might be underusing or not using properly at all.

This is WordPress. What version of WordPress are we on? We are on let's go back and this is dashboard home. 686.8.2. This is WordPress.

6.8.2. And now for those of you who have a WordPress site that has an admin panel for the database, the options table is basically the configuration. So you can export the whole thing. You don't need to know about anything about it. You can just export the entire thing as a JSON file, which we talked about previous shows, and say, here's what the here's what's in the site.

What do you think? And we'll see what Gemini, which can read JSON very well, see what it can come up with. Are you going to be applying this to marketing over coffee after the fact, John? Everything we're doing today. Do you have a style guide for marketing over coffee?

Uh we have one that we had run for a previous makeover. So we do have at least something that uh perfect. You know, going from zero. And I know you have your ICP, so yeah, I feel like I can't wait to see the final output of a new and improved marketing over coffee site. And we'll see site upgrade.

Yeah, we'll have to I get a designer to run with that one. I'm not gonna that unfortunately that doesn't make my priority list this quarter. That's fair. All right, Katie. You have a power you have powerful premium tools installed, but they are significantly underutilized.

Uh you have rank math pro the great SEO toolkit. You have Google Site Kit. Um, here's the website theme. Uh changing the positioning on the site tagline. You've got several active plugins.

Uh rank math pro is active, and you have it set the very basic person scheme, but the massive opportunities it's supposed to do actually all the highly technical stuff for you. Strategies, the the titles are too generic. Um key opportunities and redundancies. Your site has conflicting and redundant tracking. There's analytics overload, you have Matoma, but which that's fine.

We don't we normally install Matomo as a backup. Um update the site identity, configure rankmath pro, simplify your analytics. No, we're not going to do that part. Um we will get rid of the duplicate Google Tag Match plugin. Okay.

Now let's talk about the design stuff. Uh this site uses uh 20 25. Given that knowledge, how would we go about customizing it with something like a child theme so that updates don't wreck our hard work? For those who are not familiar in WordPress and many other platforms, but WordPress especially, if you upgrade the theme and you have made customizations to the theme, WordPress kind of goes, sure, new themed and deletes all your work. You're like, well, I guess we didn't really work on our design then because that that went very badly.

So the solution is to make what's called a child theme, which has all of your customizations but is independent of the parent theme. Oh, let's see. Then create the style sheet, and then uh create the theme name and template, create the functions file. This is a lot of work. This is this is the litmus test for a real web designer.

You know, if you if you're trying to get a site done on a budget and you ask them about child themes and they just get this stupid glazed overlook, like you know that you need to find somebody else because this person is not gonna be able to get the job done. Yeah. So I'm gonna complain about it. I'm gonna say this is a lot of work. And I'm not especially technical.

Can you create a file by file work plan that I can run on my computer, which is a Mac on Mac OS 15.5 using ZSH, which is our shell, um, to actually execute the work plan once you've built it. I need the work plan first, then the script, the shell script, to make it all happen. Do this in the canvas. So what we're doing here is we're saying, no, I'm not doing that. You do that.

Do you have to say do this in the canvas if you click the canvas button? Yes, for Gemini, sometimes it just disobeys. It it's it can be really annoying. Um it's really funny. Um at the end of the day, the language models are still all probabilistic tools, which means there's randomness.

So you even have to sometimes say, use your web search tool. Because those like, I don't know how to search the web. Like, yes, you do. You're literally made by Google. You know how to search the web.

Um so you have to say, use your web search tool to do this, and it will say, Oh, okay, I I remember that I and I I know how to do that. So it is like having a child, it is in a lot of ways. So here's our work plan to build these files. Right. And now it says, here is your shell script to actually do this for you.

So if I copy the contents of this, and let's start a new folder on my desktop here called Katie's site. Um let's go ahead and open up a shell. And we're gonna make this thing called uh touchkady site dot sh, which is the shell script. Let's put this into a plain old fashioned text editor, nothing fancy, and hit save. And I'll make sure we can run it.

And we run Katie site and see what happens. Uh says creating a new child theme. Create it on my desktop. I'm not sure why I created it on my desktop. We've got to go find it.

There it is. And so there's the new child theme. There's a functions file and a style file. Let's take a look at the style file to see what's in it. What did it make?

It made not much. That's not helpful. Hmm. Okay, the style file contained absolutely none of the recommendations you made. What's wrong?

Refer back to the uploaded guide and the choices to actually make the style. Is it style or styles? Style.css file in the canvas so I can copy and paste it. So again, we're gonna tell it you do this thing, I'm not doing this. I actually ran into this earlier with uh Gemini, and I don't know if it's a model specific thing or if this happens across a lot of different AI models.

You know, but I asked it to do a task and it did about half of it. And I was and it was like, okay, I'm done. I was like, cool, you gotta do the whole thing. And it was like, hmm, all right. And so it started over again, got halfway through, and it was like, okay, I'm done.

And so for a third time I had to ask, I'm like, you know, and those that's not my exact prompt. That wasn't the exact, but that was the gist. Is like you need to do it start to finish, like the whole thing. And so I don't know if that's a Gemini thing or if that's all models. That's all models.

Uh again, they're they're probabilistic tools. And I have had the experience where if the system itself is under heavy load, you're just like, nope, I give up. I'm not doing it. Um, you will also see it lose cohesion um in uh when you're when your chat history is getting too long. So this is especially problematic.

You'll see this in in Gemini when you're in developer mode. Um you will see once it gets to a certain token count, like it just loses its mind. Like, uh, I don't even remember like what the web is anymore. It just it just overloads because of a variety of math issues. Um, because okay, that's good.

What about the contents of functions dot php? You made that an empty place holder too. What should be in it? Already though, I can see in the CSS file, it's got like your dark green in there, it's got your fonts in there. So that part was good.

Let's see the functions. Uh functions actually plugin. Just like you are correct to ask. Of course I am. Get do the actual work that I asked you to do.

Whoops. Open that up, copy the contents. Let's go into the functions file now and actually paste this in so that it works. Okay. Now it uh if we did this right, which is a big if, um I should be able to go to Katie's site and uh go to appearance, go to themes, and let's see if we can add a theme.

Can I upload it? Upload. If you have a theme in a zip file, you can upload it. Yeah, and it won't let me drop drag and drop it in. That's really stupid.

Because I don't know if it's.zip, is it there it is. Let's let's see if this works. The 2025 child. And let's see if it completely wrecked your website. I mean, we started at a five.

Hey. That's something. That's actually not bad. I mean, it's a good one. I mean, it doesn't look super different.

But it's not bad. Awesome that it's just not broken. Well, yeah. When you get a broken page, you're like, oh, again, that's a win. So Chris, you get that pat on the shoulder now.

Um now we need to figure out what to do about this header image. Um, that is that is a bit on the on the bland side. Well, um, I'm fairly certain, if I recall correctly, that it's either a stock photo or one of the images. So either way, it's a stock photo. We either got it from a stock photo site or it's one of the stock photos built into WordPress.

Okay. So it's I'm gonna say I'm gonna turn off Canvas. I'm gonna say, based on the style guide and your ability to generate images with the Image N or model. Can you create a new header image for Katie's site that matches the requirements of the guide? So the guide was pretty clear.

It told us like, hey, this that potted plant thing is is a no-go. So let's see if it can use the image and model to actually make something that we want to look at. This this should be interesting because there's nothing about as far as I know, there's nothing about me personally in that uh knowledge block. So it'll be I'll be interested in. I have your LinkedIn profile.

Oh, okay. Well, but still, that's not a lot about me personally. No. I'm betting on a wizard picture, you like. If it does, then we're putting it up there.

Oh dear. Um, I specified image and four. Dang it. It might take a little while. I don't know what that means.

It's their um what the heck is that? Not quite a wizard, but a little bit mystical. Uh it's not usable, but I don't get it. The design visualizes the themes of strategy data, and human-centric connection in a sophisticated manner. By having a person with a bunch of graph charts and and like tentacles.

So, oh, that it well, see, I can't see it clearly. Is that a person? It's the devil child. Oh dear. Oh no.

No, no. Um let's say. Okay, that image is completely inappropriate for a variety of reasons. A variety of reasons. So what what should we tell it?

I mean, so this image is the opposite of human. It is very robotic. It's very machine-like. And it needs to be more organic. Okay.

What else? Um, I think the color story is good. We want to keep that. Um, I don't want the system to try to visualize strategy and data. Okay.

What should it visualize? Puppies. Um, it should, I mean, it should visualize it can visualize human connection, you know, um, more holistic, you know, being in the world, being in nature. Like it's a hu like I'm the human connector on the team. So therefore, what are the human things that people do?

Thank you for adding professionally. Because as I was saying it, I'm like, this could go really wrong. More cyclicals. This is not that kind of website, sir. Next week on Summer Makeover.

Katie files against a legal battle. How to defend yourself in the court of law. Exactly. Let's let's see what let's see what it comes up with. Because one of the things that ironically generative AI is really bad at understanding is what it means to be human.

Even though it's ingested all of our data, because it it what makes us individually human is like what makes our writing styles unique. It's the low frequency, low probability things. There is no one else who looks exactly like you. There's no one else who has your accent. There's no one else who has your perspective.

And those are all things that a probability-based model wouldn't un can't understand. Right. So let's see. We have the focus conversation, the journey. So it it gave us two concepts.

Um it didn't actually generate the images. Do either one of those makes sense. The image emphasizes emphasizes a personal connection and the act of guidance in a path ahead and reinforcing. I mean, that could be anything. I would go with option two, because it really is more of a journey versus a one on one-on-one so I'm not coaching.

And so I don't want that uh that to be the idea it really is more of I'm taking you on your organizational journey to get from where you started to where you want to be let's see if it can if it will actually obey or we'll have to switch tools it might actually obey go ahead go ahead John I was just gonna say I was wondering if we were gonna get a journey album cover here this is very possible okay since you clear can't seem to generate the image give me a prompt for imagin for that I can copy and paste that will give me the image for option two we're just gonna ask it for its prompt because it can't do it today for uh no clear reason oh google but I think you know like this is so one of the topics that we talked about like in the newsletter this week and in our slack community was you know what's your beef with AI and you know a lot of the theme was that it was like just magically gonna fix things and you know I shouldn't have to work this hard to get it to do something but you do it's just software it's just a piece of technology um and so I think that this. I'm actually glad to see some of this uh I'm actually glad to see some of this happening. Because it's not like if you want a good output, then you have to work for it. Uh-huh. No words, no text, no uh now.

Why is it photo? Oh, it's uh this is a website header image. Uh let's just call this a hero image. Uh see. I like how you do rootangs besides for the children.

I now I'm looking at it. I almost want to do a picture of me talking to me. Just to throw people off. You could. I know.

I mean, that's that's not horrible. That's an improvement. You know, it for the sake of getting this done, I would say, you know, let's choose the fourth one. I don't think it's bad. All right.

So let's go ahead and take that, bring that over to the site, go to the dashboard, let's add the media first, and add media file, find our download, which is here. All right, so that's been added. Let's go back to the home page itself. Do a quick edit here. And now trying to figure out how in the world this uh the blocks work on this thing.

Because I haven't the foggest. Oh, there's the image. Replace that image. Yeah, featured image. Media library, no.

All right, I guess we're uploading. Oh, yeah. See, it was a stock image from uh WordPress. Yeah, that's like the 2022 one or whatever. And we'll make the alt text the headline.

And hit save. All right, let's go back to the site. And see if it is horrible. Actually, not the worst thing I've seen today. Now, just this is my curiosity.

I'm not asking that we fix it, but why are there such wide margins on either side? That's the theme. Okay. Um we just have to specify the style sheet. Okay.

I mean, that's not a we need to do that right now. I was just more curious, but yeah, I mean, so for what it's worth, the content. I don't remember why we generated it, but this was actually something we came up with not that long ago. Um that I just borrowed and it was like, yeah, let me just throw it on my site so at least something is updated and coherent. It looks good on mobile too.

That's the other. Oh, look at that, John. Narrow layout is good for phone. Let's see. There's there's some I don't know where that came from.

Well, that's stock, really. Is it? Yeah. I think so. It's either stock image or WordPress might have had a AI built in, and I was like, yeah, give me an nature scene.

So yeah, yeah. So this content is the exact same that's on the home page, so you're getting it twice. Got it. Which is different. This looks like it's different.

Good for me. That's another pat on the shoulder. Uh let's see. So here's your podcasts. This should go right.

These links, I think, are fine because these are accurate. So it should go to in air insights. It should go to so what and then punch out. Yeah. Only uh the trust insights one is actually broken.

Man, John, I was so close. I I thought I had at least one page that worked correctly. There we go. Save. Um of the things that we should probably put on here, um, and it doesn't have to be a right now thing, would be clips of you speaking.

So we have so no shortage of video from conferences and events and things where you're on stage doing the thing, and if we're trying to reinforce uh that that uh you know perspective, uh it would be a good thing to have on here. Well, we wanted to have a lot of footage of me, but I had to fire my videographer because his camera kept failing. Incompetent fool. And for what it's worth, that videographer was John. God bless your soul.

You tried so hard. But every single time the the video failed, like the one time when I was speaking at inbound and we had the motion tracking set up and it just stopped. And so it was like I was over here, the motion tracker was over here. Um okay, so we've got the colors. So let's actually do this.

Um, since we're almost at 40 minutes, let's take the site now, go back to the site here, and just make sure this we'll just hide the this bar here. I'm gonna go back to snag it and let's do a capture and specify this window, begin recording, and let's see. And now turn this off, and we're gonna have Gemini essentially audit our work. Say, great, I've made some changes. Please audit the revised site shown in this video using the same scoring methodology as earlier.

What's better, what's worse, what's missing, what's unnecessary. Explain and score. And we'll now drop in the video clip. Let's try that again. Oh, canvas is on.

Turn off canvas. There we go. And let's see if we improve things at all. Let's get a six out of sixty. I mean, a six would be great.

It would be an improvement. It would be. This is the ultimate. It's like move that bus. So, you know, while this is thinking, so question for both of you in terms of repurposing content.

So, one of the things I had this really naive pipe dream that I was going to write content separate from Trust Insights for my personal site. And here we are five, six years later, and I just don't have the time or energy to write something different because I put so much of myself into the content that I do write for Trust Insights. Is it a faux pas to repurpose that content on my personal site with the links pointing to originally appeared on Trust Insights? Like, is that the way that one would handle it if they want the content in more than one place? Or should I really think about creating something net new for my personal site?

I have an answer for you that looks a lot like a big pile of code. Um, and here's what here's what I mean. Chris, I ran into the same issue of like I'm creating stuff, but I don't want to have to put it in multiple places. So what I do is I write all my LinkedIn posts in Joplin, and then I drag them out as markdown files and stuff them in this Python script, and it goes into schedules them as blog posts on my blog. So I've already written for LinkedIn, I've spent the time to write on LinkedIn.

I don't want to write it again. Um, so I just literally just drop the the markdown files in here and say go. It looks at its own internal calendar, it looks at my WordPress site and says, so you don't have any posts scheduled for these weekdays, so I'm just gonna start slotting in these these posts, and it just does the thing. It choose I I gave it the categories I wanted it to choose. Uh I gave it uh there's uh an integration into a local language model to choose the post title, and it just off it goes.

So that's how I would approach because you're already posting on LinkedIn. You're like, and you're already posting in Slack and stuff, just reuse that stuff. Okay, so that was really my question is you know, can I take my posts from LinkedIn and put them on my site as blogs? But what about like the newsletter opens that I write for Trust Insights? Would that also be something that I could be reposting with the links back to the Trust Insights website?

Yeah. Yes, uh, you should because in the age of AI crawlers, you're basically doubling up on that information on a different domain name. Okay. I mean, I have almost four years worth of weekly posts. So yeah, that needs to all get up there.

Mm-hmm. Yep. And again, that's something that you might be able to automate. Um, you uh if we've done a good job, and I hope we have, if we've done a good job of setting categories and tags on the Trust Insights website of stuff that's yours, then we should be able to export it from the back end database. Give that big old JSON file to a software like this, and say, start scheduling on KD site.

I don't well, that's a conversation for later. I don't think we have it categorized by who wrote it. I think the author is whoever posted it. And so everything's gonna show up as Kelsey's. Oh well.

Um, congratulations, your site has gone to 15. Woo five. Double digits, baby. Foundational strategy now, a three, core messaging's a three, offering structure is still not there, IP is still not really there. Um the black and white palette, yeah.

But we got the imagery, we improved the imagery, got the some improvement on the layout, structural CTAs. So yeah, it's it's better. All right. What's worth? Nothing is functionally worse.

Amazing. Exactly. So in 47 minutes with generative AI with data that we already had and with a deep research guide, we were able to make a three to X improvement on Katie's website. Yeah, 20%. Yeah.

I mean, that's that's a true claim. It is. Use generative AI to 3x your personal website. There's the tagline for the show. You know, so obviously there's more work to do.

Um, you know, I would probably want to add a services page where I could expand more on, you know, the services that we offer through Trust Insights, but really expansive on things like the workshops and um, you know, the upcoming course that's going to be based on the Trust Insights AI kit, um, which you can get at TrustInsights.ai slash AI kit. I highly recommend you get it. Um, you know, so right now the kit's free. You can download the information. Spoiler, the course will not be free.

So if you want to learn how to do the thing, get the kit, figure it out, or wait for the course, which should be coming soon. I mean, selfishly, if you want to pay for the course, that's fine with me. Oh, well, well, they don't really have a choice. We're not giving the course away. But um the point being is like now I feel like I have a better sense of what I could be doing with that website.

Um, whereas before I just kind of looked at it like it's my name. Like I got a website check. Exactly. So one of the things that we'll want to look at offline is is there an easy way to differentiate the cold opens? If there's not, then there's another angle, which is I have at least three years of stuff from letters from the coroner office, which is the same exact content, just in a different format.

So I could have generative AI splice that up uh and just start scheduling, you know, one every weekday with three years worth, you'd have what three years uh yeah, well, you have you have what uh one a week for three years. So I have 150 posts. Right, 150 posts. So if you would then do weekly on your site, uh you could get a couple of years of uh no, you could get uh what 50 weeks or so uh yeah anyway, you get to get a lot of content scheduled on there for the next however long, at least year. So not only can AI not do math, but Chris Penn can also not do math.

I yeah, my brain is not in math mode at the moment. But the other thing that's shocked me because I've never actually done it before was how easy it is to create a WordPress child theme. I'm like, oh, that's it, like we just made one in in literally minutes. It's easy, but you still have to go through the requirements gathering of what you want. So that's the part that's hard.

And so you can actually go to um our playlist on our YouTube channel for the live stream, the so what playlist, and get examples like to John's point. We created a style guide. We used AI to create it, so do that first, and then you can more easily create a child theme, but you can't create it out of nothing, you have to give it some direction. Exactly. But in terms of the technology, like, huh?

I should have been doing this all along if it was this straightforward to do, because I know this stuff. It's like, oh, I guess I guess it was not as complex as I imagined it to be. Well, I mean, but I think that's true of a lot of things. And it's not the making, it's the fact now that you've got the child theme, so updates won't automatically percolate all the way down. So now you need to like a child, you gotta sit and take care of it every time there's an update to make sure that you're you're getting that update.

You know, you don't want to miss out and have your site get hosed because everybody with the parent got the update, but you didn't because your child was running around breaking things. Not that you've been there before. Exactly. All right, folks, that's gonna do it for this week's episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we will talk to you all on the next one.

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