AI is Secretly Deciding Which Websites Succeed Online! - Greg Merrilees

Using only 20% of your business data is kind of like texting with someone who only texts in emojis. First of all, it's super annoying and you're not getting the full picture. You're missing a ton of context. That's kind of how businesses are operating right now, where they're using only 20% of their data unless you have HubSpot. So with HubSpot, this is where your emails, your call logs, your chat messages, all that can be turned into actionable insights that actually grow your business all within that platform. Because all that data is really going to make all the difference. It's a total game changer. So learn more over@HubSpot.com what if your website isn't broken? It's just misunderstood. So if AI is now deciding who gets found, which websites stand out, which ones don't, how do you make sure that it chooses you and that the design of your website, the looks of it, the copy of it, you know, all the trust labels and all these different things that you might have on there, that it's actually conveying what you need it to do with this new flow of traffic that AI is changing for everybody. So I brought in my good friend Greg Merrilies, who runs the, the best web design agency and company for, I mean, so many years, I think since 2000. So he's seen all of these things. Greg Merrilies is going to break it all down with the core principles, but also the latest and greatest you need to know with this AI influence, he has all the answers. Let's dive into it, Greg. We're doing this for, I don't know, what is it, the third, fourth, 20th time, something like that. It's great to have you back, my friend. How are you?

Yeah, really good, Joe. It's great to be back. Yeah, I've been watching your journey and yeah, the whole digital space is evolving so fast, obviously. And yeah, it's, it's good to be back. So let's talk about what's changed with websites.

That's the thing. So you're my go to just brilliant team, everything, website design, conversion, focus, you know, branded. I mean like the Hustle and Flowchart website always got to say, that was Studio One designed, that was Greg and his team did it all and it's fabulous. People still, every single time I sit, literally, it's almost every single time they're like, this site looks incredible or your branding like, oh, and I use it everywhere and I know it needs updates, but still, I'm just Like, that's great. That's brilliant.

Thanks, man.

Appreciate it. Yeah, it's really cool.

It's very unique, that website.

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes, you know, and there's people like myself drag and drag their feet a little longer, but finally it gets up and, you know, when the timing's right, it's right. Yeah. But you guys do absolutely great work. And, yeah, I felt like this has been kind of like an annual tradition as you come on, we talk about best practices for website conversion and journey. And now with this age of AI popping off more than ever, it's just only going to keep going. I feel like it's perfect timing even more so how do we navigate that? With your expertise. Because you've been in the game for, what, 20 website designs later?

Yeah, I mean, I've had my business since the year 2000, but we pivoted to websites probably around 2012, something like that. But even in that time there's been, you know, massive shift in, in the way we approach website design. But yeah, more so in the last year, year, year and a half, two years. Just mainly because AI search is stealing everybody's website traffic. Right. So it just means, yeah, the whole game has changed with how you need to position yourself in the market and the marketing that you have to do. And you don't need as much website traffic if they've already been warmed up on social media, you know, and LinkedIn and YouTube and whatever, that's where you build massive trust with your brand. So it used to be get people to your website as soon as possible and then build a lot of trust on your website, but now it's like they're pretty warm by the time they come to your website. They've done their research before beforehand, they spend a lot of time with your brand outside of your website. So therefore, back in the day, you used to have a lot of copy on your website, you know, and we're talking back in the day, two years ago, because you need to do a lot of convincing to that colder traffic, but if the traffic's warmer, then you don't need to do as much convincing. So I guess it just depends on your traffic source to how much copy you need on your website and how many lead magnets and what those lead magnets needs to do and what funnel steps you need.

What.

Or since the traffic's majority warm, you just need to lead them to the next step in the funnel, get a take a sales call or buy something, because they're pretty warm most of the time these days.

I Mean, that's a big shift right there and. Cause I was going to ask you what's the biggest shift in your mind over the last, let's call it, year of web design. What we should be thinking of as a business owner with a front facing website or personal brand, is it mainly that like understanding that search traffic has kind of changed?

I think that's part of it. And I guess an exercise would be, you know, for the listener to do a search for, you know, whatever it is that you offer in the certain geographic region or the target market that you serve. You know, just put that into a sentence and just see what comes up and it'll be maybe you, maybe your competitors and then really deep dive into, you know, into all of those answers. You know, you'll get a little text link in the AI answer, whether that's Google or Chatty or whatever. ChatGPT. And so then have a look at all of those websites to see why they're being chosen. We'll see what's good about them, but also more importantly, see what's bad about them. Where you have unique angle and I think if you can find your uniqueness and position your brand differently from your competitors, then that's a really good way. Obviously take what they're doing well but then find that uniqueness so that you can fill a gap for how you want to stand out from your competitors. And so to me that's all about brand positioning and that is probably the most important thing in an AI era so that you will be found and remembered and you know, stand out in a unique way.

I think it's a big, a great practice and you'd be surprised, you know, and I'm talking to the audience here of like, if you look up your name or your brand or yeah, what you're selling in a, in an area or to a certain amount of people just to see what pops up. And like what does AI and this new search know about you? Because yeah, it has a lot of principles of Google and all the SEO stuff, but it definitely, it, it functions differently and it's, it's using sources that you might not be thinking about. You're like, oh wow, okay, like maybe I should update that or, or reposition this way.

What it's really looking for is why you're the authority in your niche and you need to share your insights to make sure that people understand your point of view on the topic that you deliver. And then on top of that, so you need to build your business website, your personal brand website, and then everything around that needs to reflect with your. What I call your North Star. So think about your messaging, what is unique about you, and that needs to be reflected in everything that you do across all of those platforms. So it's probably a little bit more work these days. But if you can figure out what is unique about you and then be known for that and spread that message everywhere, that's the way to stand out in an AI era.

I couldn't agree enough because it was even right before we hit recording, you know, it's. We're talking about with the AI era, it's fast to build things like an MVP or a first version with just like, what, a prompt or two, right? Like, yeah, you have all these sites now that, that you could do that, really, if you think about it, then you can code it, Vibe code it, or whatever it is. But.

Yeah, totally.

But at the same time, you see there's a sea of sameness that starts to happen, right? Like, there's not really a lot of uniqueness to. I mean, when you start to develop some of these things and you look at what's created, you're like, oh, that looks like that was made in Replit or some like, you know, one of these Vibe coding softwares where the layout just all kind of looks the same. Similar kind of icons, the font, you're like, I think I know how they did this.

Exactly. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And we use Replit, Cursor Lovable, all those tools for Vibe coding, lead magnets, essentially. A lot of PDFs are kind of the old way, but what we're doing for clients and for us is turning our lead magnets into interactive tools. And you can do that really easy with Vibe code and then just put the code on your WordPress website or, you know, Webflow, whatever it is. And so then it becomes, you know, way more like, usable for the prospect because they get to see an instant result. They don't have to download a PDF and read through it and all that and, you know, fill out a checklist, all that. Just give them a tool that they can interact with there and then. And that is really easy for Vibe coding. But yeah, like you said, Joe, if you're going to do a full website with Vibe coding, be prepared for a pretty average result. Now, I know it's improving all the time, but. And we're testing it all the time. So we design in Figma, we design custom websites and then we take the Figma file and we import that into one of the Vibe coding tools and even though it says it can do it, the results are terrible. So you still need a developer to be able to tweak the code. I mean you can vibe code meaning, you know, you talk to it via voice or just chat and tell it what to change and what to. What you want it to do with interactivity and all that sort of stuff. But it's still never perfect. So. But you may get, you know, 60, 70% of the way there but because we do custom design and we're very much, you know, non template looking websites, they're quite unique. Right. And they're probably a little bit complex for a Vibe code to do. For now we still need a developer to do the, you know, the last 30, 40% thereabouts. But it does save a lot of time for sure. But I can't wait for the day, yeah, I can't wait for the day where you can just design in Figma, just send it to one of those platforms, get it built and get it live like that to me is the future that I'm just waiting for. Can't wait.

Oh yeah, it's not going to be long at all. But there's always, as I think of AI more and more I'm thinking of what are the core principles of what matters most. Because if we get away from the principles of doing things, I mean that's literally your book next level. Get out here. I mean it's a, it's a, it's all about web design. I mean this thing is, it's beefy and. But this thing has, I mean what it's. You said on the back, you're going to stop losing sales with a website that isn't designed strategically or positioning your brand uniquely. And I think that's the key piece that like the human element is almost like more important in this world of AI where things are fastly created or just moving so fast that you need that human connection to connect emotionally, you know, with the buyer. Whoever prospect you're chatting with.

Couldn't agree more. And I guess that's yeah. Why I wrote the book. I mean there's a lot of website books out there. A lot of just coding books are probably obsolete now, but some of them are, you know, conversion focus, you know, some of them are copyrighting focused and this is kind of using copywriting principles, conversion principles, page structures and then the five key principles, you know, to. It's really like more of a blueprint. It's very comprehensive. That's why it's 333 pages thick. And yeah, it goes deep. It really is a blueprint. And then, yeah, it's really those five main principles. And it is like you said before, and you can use AI for doing some of these things, but understanding your audience. And so if you really think about who your ideal audience is, you know, what makes them tick, what are their challenges, why they choose you, why they don't choose you, why they choose competitors, what their experience was with competitors and all that sort of stuff, then when you do that and you can do that research with AI, like using deep research within ChatGPT is pretty powerful, right? Yeah. And so, so then it's really, and you know, you may know these things as well, it'll deep dive all of your reviews, your testimonies, your case studies, your competitors, and it'll help you find that unique point of difference as well. And I guess that leads to the second principle, which is brand positioning, because you really want to zig where your competitors zag. Right. If you want to stand out in a meaningful way. And so yeah, that's where again, that exercise that we talked about before, study your competitors and figure out that uniqueness. And sometimes it's not easy to find, but if you do look at your customer testimonials, sometimes the gold is hidden in them. If you, because you may be too close to your business. But if you can read and have AI read all of your testimonials and say, what is the unique factor that it keeps recurring amongst all of my testimonials and social proof? And that may be your uniqueness that you want to use as your North Star and have all your marketing directed towards that. But then, yeah, marketing strategy. So yeah, sure, I can, can vibe code. A website may look average, sure. But it's more than that. So think about your audience like, are they cold, warm or hot when they come to your website? You know, most people don't buy immediately. If you have a conversion rate above, you know, 3% on a traffic, a cold traffic website, that's pretty good, right? But if it's not that good, that's where you need to think about different lead magnets. That's why we mentioned the interactive ones that probably work better these days because people get a better result. But then think about as well. Yeah, like for warm traffic or hot traffic, you know, you want to make sure you've got a pathway for them as well. So there's a lot that goes into the strategy piece and then you test these things over time because your audience changes over time. You Know, your competitors change over time, so you have to constantly test new lead magnets, new funnel steps, new strategies. So, yeah, I mean, AI can give you one, but to constantly tweak that and change it over time, you know, it's kind of like you need a dynamic website essentially. And then, yeah, the psychological influences and that is where, you know, people buy on emotion and then they justify with logic, for instance. So the copy on your website does need to reflect, you know, your audience's pain points. That's why the first step is to understand your audience on a deep level. Um, and then the copy on your website, you want to say it in as few words as possible and I guess that's the hardest bit. Right, because even the best copywriters in the world, so if I had more time, I would have written less copy because it's hard. Right, yeah. And then think about all the other psychological drivers as well to showcase your authority. Back it up with social proof. You want a consistent voice message, branding look and feel and, you know, a little bit of scarcity in there as well. You want to move, remove like friction points and leakage points on your website to, you know, just keep people engaged and to convert. There's a lot of tricks you can do there, but yeah, and that comes into conversion focused design. So needs to be strategically designed, needs to appeal to your target audience. You need to have the right pathway and sort of all those factors combined will lead into the right design that's obviously mobile, responsive, loads fast on mobile, but has all of the visual hierarchy and, you know, the high impact call to actions and the right type of word in and everything, you know, set in a way that is going to appeal to your target market and be more likely to convert them into leads and sales.

And see, those are the principles right there. Yeah, exactly, that's. Yeah. And I'll just list them because I just, I just pulled them up here too. Just to remind, you know, that list, it's understanding the audience or your audience and you know, brand positioning, marketing strategy, psychological influences and conversion focused design.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And then on top of that, if you think about, your website's never finished. Right. So like I said, you've got to test how. Because we don't know every client, this website we've designed how their audience is going to respond to the new website. Even though we use all those best practices, every audience is different and like I said, they evolve over time. So when I say your website's never finished, which is actually the last chapter in the book that's about monitoring your user behavior. And this is where conversion optimization comes in. And yes, you can use some AI tools. Really good tool actually is Microsoft clarity, which is 100% free. And I feel like everybody should have that on their website because, you know, there are other paid tools. But this is equally as good, in my opinion. And it will record every video user of your website, it'll create heat maps, and it even has AI built in to give a summary of the pages because it can be quite time consuming to go over all those heat maps and watch videos of every user of your website. So this will summarize that user behavior. So yeah, it's really important. And so then you pair that with your analytics, your Google Analytics, your data from people using the forms on your website, from your sales data from all the funnel steps, blah, blah, blah, your email nurture campaign. And then you hypothesize and figure out, right, what should we tweak based on all that data? And you'll constantly find improvements, you know, month after month. And so that's why I say your website's never finished. So you take all those principles with best practice and then constantly, you know, tweak it over time.

That's a big ding, ding, ding for me, like Microsoft Clarity. Actually, I've never used it and because I've definitely used some other heat map. I think Hot Jar was one. But yeah, like this is, it's perfect. The fact that it could tie into Google Analytics and a whole bunch of other things, it looks like.

Yeah, hotjar is the other one. Yeah, we use for years. Yeah. And it's fantastic. And yeah, it's probably got some extra features like you can do user polls and things like that on there. So Hotjar is great. I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying if you want a free version, micro, pretty good.

Yeah, it's backed by Microsoft too, so not bad. But yeah, yeah, that's what I've realized. Yeah, it's like the website. I mean, everything's evolving so fast. So user behavior is probably the biggest one, I would imagine because of tools like ChatGPT and things going voice forward and being interactive.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think there's many things to tweak on your website and I think the biggest thing is the lead magnets. You know, like, sure, if the traffic coming to your website, they just want confirmation that you're is the real deal. You know, they may be warm on social media, but they still may not 100% trust you yet. So it's really good to put trust building things on your website. So that's why Joe, you introduced me to the tool Delphi and man, that's just a game changers. Incredible. Maybe I'll just sort of unpack the story, how that came about.

Yeah, go for it. I like it from your perspective.

So what actually happened was I, from my book, I uploaded the whole book to a custom GPT and created like an interactive author, had some guardrails around it and things like that. And so Joe was on my email list and saw that I was promoting the interactive author and he sent me an email and, and a video and just showed me that he could get the, not the content but the rules that I put around custom GPT and he pretty much said, look, you know, that's great but there are some issues with it and people can only have a text chat with it. He said, what if I could show you a better way and introduce me to Delphi. Now I've been following Joe's podcast for years, so I, I know it was a couple of years ago, perhaps that you were one of the first Delphi customers. You've got it on your website and I did use it back in the day thinking, wow, that's incredible because you got all of your podcast episodes in there, all that knowledge and anyway, I just didn't think of that at the point when I started, you know, the custom GPT. I just thought, well, it's easy and you know, I've already got a paid account, blah, blah, blah. But then we jumped on a call, Joe, and you showed me all of the possibilities and all the extra things you can do with it and all the training material you can upload. You can upload everything audio, you know, and you can't do that with ChatGPT. So you can do so much more with the training data. And then, you know, the way you put guardrails around it is just amazing. And so the outcome of that is we've just put it on our website as a, we tried it as a pop up, sorry, a little chat bubble first that wasn't quite visible. And I thought, you know, maybe we just, you know, based on your advice was to put it as an actual page like you do on your website, Joe. And yeah, that's a game changer. So people now coming back to, I think any, everybody should do this. They can have not just a text chat with me, but we've uploaded my audio book file, you know, into there as well so they can have an Audio call with me and I just reckon that's amazing. It's just super helpful. And this is the tool that I believe most websites should have on if they want to build more trust with their brand so that people can interact with, you know, the founder of the business. So like I said, they may be warmed up from social media. They come to your website, they can have another chat and to see how you can help them specifically, that's golden. You have to be there so your time's leveraged. It's just amazing.

That's it. Yeah. And you're leaving no one hanging. They have the ability to start an instant chat with AI. Greg, that.

Yeah.

Is that is trained on all of just your ip. It's not going to go out and tried to make up some different web design principles or conversion principles that you know may not be right. Hey, I want to pause the episode really fast and shout out another podcast that's on the HubSpot podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals. The podcast is called this Old Marketing and it's hosted by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. And these guys have been around for a while, very well known experts in content marketing. So if you want anything around content marketing and the trends and, and basically the rants and, and you know, it, it just brings in a lot of the tactical but really fun conversations. They're not more than an hour long. So you'll be able to jump in there, get some actionable stuff for your content marketing and then jump right out and then go do some stuff with it. So I highly recommend to go listen to the Old marketing wherever you get your podcast and go enjoy. What if your expertise could work for you 24, 7 even while you sleep. So at AI build team we create AI powered digital twins that clone your knowledge, your voice and even your style so you can scale without burning out. So imagine multiplying yourself, but without multiplying your time or your team's time. And the cool part is you don't have to imagine any of this. You can actually chat with my own AI twin right now. Just go over to AI Build Team, AI Slash Joe and you can see how it works for yourself. Again, that's AI Build Team, AI slash Joe.

That's a really good point. Yeah. Because custom GPT on ChatGPT, that'll use some of the knowledge that they have as well and it doesn't always align with, you know, with what I believe. So yeah. Having the actual. Yeah. Guardrails around it where it only uses the data that you upload to it like in Delphi, that. That's so much better, in my opinion. And yeah, and so we upload all of our services, our entire website, our blog posts, our, you know, like, call recordings, just all sorts of things to help guide it on the way. We would talk to our clients about our services, but leading with value the whole way.

This is super cool to hear how your perspective, like from. From someone else that, you know, you just learned about it just recently, but you already had in your mind. All right. A custom GPT is a cool add on to this book that you just, that you just released, which, you know, making things, I think, like what people want now is interactivity. You mentioned that with the lead magnet, people want to personalize whatever they're doing and also get instant, immediate results. You know, it's like that's the world we're living in. Our attention span is so short. So, you know, books, at the end of the day, I have a ton of books and I still read books, paper books, which I, I think a lot of people still do. Nostalgia, in a way, but it slows you down, right? Like, that's when you know, you want to go deeper and you're like, okay, I really want to understand about my. Well, the first thing I turn to offer page mistakes that hurt conversions. That's pretty big.

So.

But if I wanted to go to Delphi, I could plug in. Okay, tell me more about offer page mistakes that are hurting conversions. But like, here's what my web, like, kind of some of the copy from my site, you know, you can maybe put some ideas that you might be thinking about and it will now personalize the book to, to the, the person.

Yeah, they can have a conversation with it and really get granular if they want. I mean, they can ask it to review their actual website and, you know, their copy and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, it's. It's pretty powerful. But yeah, just think about other businesses listening to this. You know, you can work for any type of business. It doesn't, you know, this is just. You don't need a book, you don't need a podcast. Like, yeah, there's other ways you can use it, right, Joe?

That's right. Yeah. No, it doesn't take much content to honestly make it work well, and there's a bunch of ways you can load content in there. Any kind of text, audio, video and. But yeah, it's like I've seen just, you know, 10,000 words all the way up to. I think mine is around 17 million words. I've seen some up to like 50 million. I mean, like. But you don't need that much. That's to your point. Like, you don't need to have all this media. It could just be, you know, like a consultant. There's a lot of consultants that use it to, you know, put on their booking page. Whereas a lead magnet, which, you know, like what you have as an agency, you're using yours as kind of the core meet a lead magnet on your homepage, but also on the landing page, it seems like.

Yeah, exactly. We have an individual page for it as well. But, yeah, it's quite new. I mean, we've already got people interacting with it, but it's quite new. Too new to say, you know, here's the results from it. But, yeah, it's only two days.

Come back later. No, I'm just stoked that you jumped on it because, I mean, I again, always respect you as the go to web design, but, like, conversion, just not just design. That's the thing. It's like, I never want to say, okay, Greg's a great designer. It's like, hold on. No, Greg understands, like, the human element and how people interact because you get so much feedback as well from, obviously, clients, but also your team. I mean, you have, like, your fingers on the pulse more than anybody else I know.

Yeah, exactly. And the industry changes so fast and, yeah, if you don't stay up with all this AI change, you'll get left behind for sure. But I guess that's a lesson for everybody listening. And I know AI can seem scary, but, yeah, I think these days, the more you focus on educating yourself and using these tools, the more you won't be left behind and more you'll see the opportunity and think about it in a positive light.

Now, you know someone, let's say, if they're. I don't know, walk me through it. I don't have the perfect scenario. I'm just thinking of someone with a website right now that might feel like, all right, so what's. What's, like a step that I could take that's kind of like a nice actionable step that. That you would. Typically, when you audit someone's website for the first time, you just. Maybe if you're naturally going to someone's website, maybe this is the way. Like, what's your first impression? Where do you look, Greg, and be like, that thing. If that thing changed, that would move the needle.

I'm looking at it through a lens of the way, you know, the way I Look at every website these days is, you know, we've got to think about it from the audience's perspective. If somebody lands on their website, it needs to have clarity for one, needs to clearly articulate what you do. But yeah, you don't want to confuse people. You want to make sure that they understand why they should choose you as well. They just want, like most businesses get it wrong. You know, they just talk about what they do and why we're so good. But realistically, people just want their, you know, three main questions answer, like, what you do, why should they trust you over your competitors and what to do next? Basically, you know, and then if they do purchase from you, like, what if something goes wrong? How can they contact you quickly? A lot of websites these days, the business owners are very hard to, or the business in general, very hard to get in contact with. You know, they make it hard to contact. So, yeah, that's why making it easy is super important. But yeah, and then I would say if, you know, somebody's listening to this and they look at their own website, maybe even use this interactive tool, the Delphi right on studio1design.com AI and ask it to give you the feedback because, yeah, I think that's probably a good place to start. And that's what I do these days when I'm reviewing clients websites. I use my own tool, you know, and it'll break it down.

Might be doing that right now, actually. But just to back up your point, but keep going.

Yeah, sure. And it'll break it down into the sections in the book, because the whole book is guiding, you know, the AI. So it will. You can even ask it to review, you know, competitors and try and help you find that uniqueness, how you stand out from your competitors. But yeah, realistically, do you answer those questions, like, do you. Are you the trusted authority and can you prove that you get results? Because that's what people want. You know, like I said, they're going to be on all these other platforms like Reddit and all these other social media to figure out what other people are saying about your brand. And when they come to your website, they just want confirmation and they obviously want to make sure that, you know, you have a solution to their unique problem. So even down to segmenting, that's probably not a bad strategy. So you might have different offers or different audience types. So it's good to have an individual landing page for each of those so that then you can talk specifically to their pain points and challenges and show social proof that's Completely relevant to that, you know, segment of your market. So yeah, I guess there's a lot to unpack on what I would look for on reviewing somebody's website. I also look at the design quality. I think that's important. If you think about brand positioning, do you look different from all of your competitors? Do you match your price point? So if you're a high end brand, does your website look high end? Or if you're a low ticket offer, does your website look too expensive for that offer? And people might get the wrong impression? So the look and feel needs to match the price point. And obviously I want to make sure, you know, looking at the flow of the design, the visual hierarchy that obviously needs to make sense from a conversion perspective. And there's a lot of people try to put too much on a page. I guess the homepage is the only page will have multiple call to actions because that is essentially a gateway to get to all of the other pages. But all of the other pages really should just have one call to action. One thing that AI is finding like in an AI search these days are your blog posts. If they've been positioned, excuse me, correctly. There's a lot that you can do to a blog post these days. Neil Patel has some really good structure for blog posts to help your blog posts get found in an AI search. And yeah, so there's a lot that you can do there because if that's the number one place that people will find your brand, then you want to use that page as the intro to your business. So you want to have a lead magnet. We generally have a sticky lead magnet. On one side we'll have a table of contents. On the other side we'll have a little snippet area above the blog post so that I can get a summary of what this blog post is about. You want to put your personality. If you use AI to create blog content, you want to put your personality over the top of it so it doesn't just feel like AI. You want to showcase what you think, your authority over the top of each topic, you know, so things like that are important. So I'd look for all those things.

Yeah, that was a masterclass right there. I love it. I'll say one thing like back to Delphi, that is that's something you can use for content generation, at least as a first pass. I would still always manually do things, but speaks in your voice and it has your knowledge. So it's like structuring the content. I mean, I've seen people outline some New books using Delphi or blog posts for sure.

That's amazing. I haven't thought about that. Actually. I'll use ChatGPT with my book uploaded to that and I use that for sure. Yeah, it'd be even better to use Delphi because it's just your content. But rearrange into blog posts and we'll.

Make this for you, Greg, but basically internal version that you and your team can use. So if you, you know, it doesn't need to be a public version, but it would know, hey, this is Greg or Greg's team working on content or whatever copy, you know, that's based on what your. Your principles are. So.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay, good stuff. Fantastic.

We'll talk later. Yeah. Hey, I get ideas, you know, when we're doing cool stuff. But what? Yeah, actually as you were chatting, it was funny. I started this right before you started giving me your. Basically how you think you just unpack that all and it's my takeaway also is like, it's also very emotional. It's like, you know, it's like they're humans. We got to remember humans are the ones that are reaching us online. And yeah, AI is helping us get discovered and warm things up, you know, social as well. But it's the humans, when I went on the site that need to give the feeling that it's actually what's right for them, whatever they're looking for. And using all the points you just said really fast. I want to. I'm going to share my screen and we can maybe wrap on this. But like I'm going to call out how my website at AIBuildTeam AI. I think it's a good start, but this basically ripped it open and said like, you got some work to do in a good way. But this is gonna share. Here it is. Okay. Hopefully this comes through. Can you see that on your side?

Got it. Thank you.

Cool. So all I did is I just copied all the, you know, just the homepage. But I mean, I'm just going to go a little quick. I'll make it zoomed in. I mean, it says right off like, okay, you have a clarity problem. And Greg, that's what you've been saying, you know, clarity key. So it's defining where it feels like clarity is needed and it's giving me a fix. You can see it right there. And I'm going to review this all in much more detail later. It says I have a value problem. Yeah. So it's benefits are sound big, but generic. Good feedback.

Yeah.

Design hierarchy problem. Two CTAs creates decision friction. So it's talking about put one primary CTA, which you also mentioned that trust problem, which is actually literally what I'm working on right now are case studies and testimonials, which. I knew this, called it out. It's so true.

Excellent.

So, yeah, having. Having some kind of proof elements CTA problems. It's. It's too vague basically. So match the CTAs to intent and then it's giving me different CTAs to use in different parts of the website. Freaking awesome.

Got it. Yes, got it. So it's giving you a lead magnet idea. Freak client strategy.

Yeah. Positioning. Yeah, we have flow problems. So it's kind of basically saying, hey, the flow should be kind of reworked here and here's how do. Just keeps going. Yeah. Lead magnets. There you go. Which is true. I've been thinking about how do I clone ROI calculator voice. Yeah. This is awesome.

Yeah. So that'd be a great interactive tool of to vibe code the ROI of Deli. Yeah.

And that's, that's. It's funny. I've been mapping out an audit that is an roi, but also shows like what can be done. But I think the clone ROI calculator is actually even better. So I know what I'm vibe coding this weekend.

It'll take you 10 minutes. What's next?

Probably. That's right. Yeah. It's giving me copy edits that can boost conversions. Just right up here. I mean this is literally. I just copied and pasted the copy and there you go. So I'm showing everybody. And maybe we'll put some of these visuals as Greg, you were talking about it. But yeah, like this is what we're talking about. Like get instant AI help. You have it pop up right there. And then when you go over here. Actually I have it. Oh, there we go. And it's going to be embedded right here. So there's a lead magnet for you.

Yeah, exactly.

Call. Yeah.

And your team, I said to your team, you know, the goal of this is really get to people to get a free video audit of their website conversions. Right. So I put that on the page, the form. And so now the, the Delphi. If you ask me questions, it'll be helpful, but it'll. Then it'll try to lead you to filling out that form to get a free, you know, audit.

Yeah, I didn't show that. But actually down here as I scroll down, check it out. Like this is that same thread that would also Be. I'm just not on the embedded version. But you can see. Yeah. At the very end it says, boom. Hey, do you want to. Here's your call to action right there.

Yeah, well, that's the bundle, but underneath that, the last line. Free specific. Sorry, that bit there.

Yeah, yeah.

Get a free website conversion audit. So that's the main last call to action someone would read. And that's on the page, so they'll see it straight away.

Yeah. So if I go back over here. There it is. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, I think, you know, like, it's a really good opportunity as a lead magnet. Now, there are different ways, Joe, I remember you saying you can ask people to opt in for this to interact, but I just want to. I don't want to put that barrier in front. So we're testing it without the opt in, because we're going to have the opt in on the page anyway for the next step as the lead magnet, we just want to provide as much value with Delphi first.

Yeah, no, it's a great experience. You can do the call feature here. Yeah, I like it. It's clean, so good stuff.

Yeah, exactly. And it's good having it embedded on my website. It's not like people go to delphi.com, you know, GregMerrilies, whatever, they can interact right there on Studio One within our website, which is cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Greg, this is awesome. I'd say. What do you. What are you most excited about, like, as. As time goes on and it could be website. I just feel like in the next, like year or so, we're gonna have some massive changes. So is there anything that you were personally looking forward to, maybe both business and personal, that, that you want to toss out there?

From a business perspective, I am looking forward to Vibe coding getting even better because I've always wanted to be a design business, not a dev business, you know, but we've got, you know, probably eight designers, eight developers, and it's expensive to do dev, you know, and it's a headache and it takes forever. So if Vibe coding can reduce the time for our developers, then we'll keep all the developers, but we'll just be able to deliver websites much faster. And then I can make them dynamic where we can just constantly test new ideas from conversion optimization for clients, where, you know, see how we put in an implement and implement a new idea, get it live and then just constantly tweak it and revise it and. And get that live a week later, like Imagine a website that's dynamic based on results. Like, that's what I'm super excited about. It's just around the corner.

I'm imagining that's going to open up a lot more time for you and your team on the personal.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Then we just get back to being design business and the vibe coding just happens so much easier for our developers, you know, so there's still a lot that the developers will need to do with connecting to all of the third party services and hosting and email, that sort of stuff. But yeah, I feel like that's going to be a game changer. And then apart from that. Yeah. Personally, I mean, I love snow skiing. That's. That's my thing. My whole family loves it. And yeah, so we just, we're going to Japan in a, In a car. Three months, which is our, Our summer. Your. Your winter reverse.

That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so we're just trying to do more of that and yeah. Just, you know, thinking about the. How AI may affect everything. We're starting to look at our life and think, well, you know, getting older, so it's time to simplify. And if AI does cause unemployment, which, you know, who knows, right?

Shifting of roles.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. But how's that going to affect property prices and things like that, you know, and I don't know, we're just starting to think. Well, we have a lot of knowledge on AI and how it could potentially affect things. So we're thinking about, you know, downsizing and restructuring and spending more time doing what we love, traveling more and just. Yeah. Eliminating debt, things like that.

That's all good goals. Yeah. I'm in similar conversations in my house here too.

Yeah, right. Yeah, There you go.

How do you, how do you just fork. It's hard to forecast even a couple years out, but isn't it? But most of the population doesn't even know what we know. And the stuff we're talking about in this podcast or just in tech in general, it's rapid in. Most of the general public has no clue, which is still. It's kind of frightening.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. So we just need to, you know, we've got this knowledge. Let's. I don't want it to be. I don't want to be saying, ah, I wish we had done this or that. It's too late now, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I love your vision of, yeah. Vibe coding being this thing that can make you and your team be even more rock stars on the design side of things. Which has always been your DNA. Like all the way from T shirts back in the day, Right?

That's right.

Yeah, I remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's exciting, man. So, Greg, I appreciate you. You're awesome.

Likewise, Joe. Great conversation.

Yeah. Get. Get Greg's new book. Where can they find this and everything else?

Go to Amazon. There's a website, next level website, design.com and. Yeah, and then you can buy the book on Amazon from there. Yeah, cool.

Next level website, design.com. and then Studio One Design is your agency. Design agency. You can play around with both and. Yeah. Cool, man. Well, we will do this again. Maybe in a year, maybe less. We'll see.

You bet. Mac. Thank you so much.

Sam.