Websites – The Great Comeback

A fellow agency owner told me that a client of his said to him, “I don’t think websites matter much anymore. AI is taking over.”

… and I have some thoughts about this. The marketing landscape has been changing so much over the past 5 years, and I’ve had a lot of opportunities to sit with these changes, watch them unfold, and second-guess everything.

As of today, I have settled on business-owned websites are having a resurgence, actually.

Let’s zoom out:

Mid-90s: Having a website was a novelty. Most small businesses didn’t bother. If you had one, it was either a Geocities experiment or a clunky page someone’s niece/nephew built.
Fun fact, my first-ever paid gig was building a website for my uncle’s software company over the summer – an HTML 3 site with hand-pixeled graphics and a lot of inline styling!

2000s: Websites were essential. People wanted information, and lots of it. A “good” website had a sitemap, sometimes Flash animations, maybe even a user forum. We had rss-feed readers to keep up with blog content scattered across the web.

2010s: Social media took over. For most small businesses, the website turned into a glorified business card – just enough to look legit and have an email address that wasn’t @hotmail.com. Blogs died off because nobody bothered to go to privately-owned blogs because the conversation conveniently was happening on aggregated places like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and reddit.

We are here:

2020s: People are leaving social media in droves. The algorithm got too noisy and lost our trust. Suddenly websites are looking good again, as a space where you have control over your own information. And good content, including blog content, is good for your SEO.

New expectations, new opportunities

We are now halfway through the 2020s and we have several new problems: The internet is drowning in AI-generated slop. Everything’s starting to look the same – same layouts, same phrases, same vaguely professional stock photo of a laptop and a latte.

And that’s one reason why websites (good, useful websites, rich in relevant content) have made a comeback.

Our second new issue (and this has nothing to do with AI) is that now, readability is taking priority over experimental design, partly because everyone’s on their phones, and partly because accessibility standards are finally getting more attention.

A generic-looking, templated brochure kind of website offers little in terms of information relevant to the end user, offers no proof, and gives you no reason to believe a real person is behind it.

What resonates with people right now is authenticity: unpolished writing. Messy, real photos. Reviews that aren’t curated to death. Blog posts that sound like a person wrote them on a slightly tired Friday afternoon (like I am today). Anything that proves that a real person is behind this business.

We’re circling back to this: a website is not just a business’ digital front door, it’s one of the few remaining spaces on the internet that you can actually fully own.

If you’re a small business, a cooperative, a nonprofit, an artist, a therapist, a maker – then your website matters more right now than it did 10 years ago. This may change again – who knows what the 2030s will hold for us all?

But for now, if you can create something that feels human, grounded, and yours, people will notice.