Your website as your first employee

Many websites are still designed like a printed catalogue: a nice front page, a list of services and a contact form. They get visits, but they do nothing with them.

Look at it the way you'd look at an employee. It should look after people who arrive out of hours and answer the questions everyone asks. It should also tell the difference between someone ready to buy and someone just browsing. And it should 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. Nobody has to copy details from an email into another tool.

An AI assistant helps a lot if it's built well. 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. It can talk by text or voice on the website, and by phone too. An assistant that makes answers up is worse than having none.

Some of your visitors use a screen reader, navigate with the keyboard only, zoom the text right up or find complex content hard to follow. If your website doesn't work for them, it shuts them out. And many of them wanted to buy.

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. 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. Security and privacy matter just as much. What the website does with its visitors' data has rules, starting with GDPR.

And 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 they do turns the website into a working tool. Without that, it's 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. Open it on your phone with a poor connection. Try to get through it using only the keyboard, no mouse.

Ask who receives the forms and how long they take to reply. If nobody knows for sure, you have found the first problem. Once that's fixed, no message waits until Monday. And your team spends its time on the people who 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. I also build ValidWise, a scanner that runs 70 automated checks on European websites. It covers accessibility, GDPR, security headers, the AI Act and legal requirements. ValidWise detects issues; it does not certify that a website complies with the law.

Before that I spent years 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 (Dentsu X and iProspect), one of the large media agency networks. I know what each visit costs to attract. A website that doesn't turn visits into conversations throws that money away.