Your website as your first employee

Many websites get visits but do nothing with them, because they're still designed like a printed catalogue. They have a nice front page, a list of services and a contact form, and not much else.

Look at it the way you'd look at an employee: what would you ask of the person who answers your company's door? Probably to look after people who arrive out of hours and to answer the questions everyone asks. And also to tell someone ready to buy from someone just browsing, and to let the right person know.

A well-connected website asks for just enough to understand what each visitor needs. Then it sends that to whoever can solve it, context included. That way your team doesn't have to copy details by hand from an email into another tool.

An AI assistant helps a lot if it's built well. Built well means it answers only from your company's information and says “I don't know” when it doesn't. When it should, it hands the conversation to a person, and it can talk by text or voice on the website, and by phone too. And be careful, because an assistant that makes up answers is worse than having none.

A website that isn't accessible shuts the door on some of its visitors, and many of them wanted to buy. I mean people who use a screen reader, use only the keyboard, zoom the text right up or find complex content hard to follow.

On top of that, since 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EAA) sets accessibility requirements for many consumer products and services. Much of e-commerce is among them, so it's worth knowing whether it applies to you and where your website stands.

A slow employee loses customers, and so does a slow website, especially on mobile. And security and privacy matter just as much. What the website does with its visitors' data has its own rules, starting with GDPR.

Then you have to measure, because if you don't know where visits come from or where they leave, you don't know what to fix. Knowing that and seeing what visitors do turns the website into a working tool. Without that data, it stays one more fixed cost.

Write to your own website as if you were a customer, on a Sunday night, and see what happens to that message. Then open it on your phone with a poor connection and try to get through it using only the keyboard, without touching the mouse.

Also ask who receives the forms and how long they take to reply, because if the answer isn't clear, you've found the first problem. And once that's fixed, no message is left waiting until Monday. Your team also gets to spend its time on the people who really want to buy.

I build AIsWise, AI assistants that serve your customers by text and voice on the website with accessibility built in. And I build agents that answer the phone too. On top of that I build ValidWise, a scanner that runs 70 automated checks on European websites. It covers accessibility, GDPR, security headers, the AI Act and legal requirements, but it only detects issues and does not certify that a website complies with the law.

I know what each visit costs to attract, so a website that doesn't turn visits into conversations looks to me like money down the drain. I learned it in the years I spent in performance marketing. I ran campaigns for major brands from London and, later, large advertising budgets across five markets. In London I was Global Lead, Automation & Tech at Dentsu International (iProspect and Dentsu X), one of the large media agency networks.