So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.
You can watch on YouTube Live. Be sure to subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode!
In this episode of So What? The Trust Insights weekly livestream, you’ll learn how to leverage Generative AI for web design to rapidly improve your existing website. Discover how to apply generative AI to build a strong foundation for your site and attract your ideal clients. You will gain practical steps to use generative AI for web design in a way that generates real results.
Watch the video here:
Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- What Gen AI tools are available to help with web design
- How to build an effective website strategy
- How to overhaul an existing site with new web design
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Katie Robbert 00:00
Well, hey everyone. Happy Thursday. Welcome to “So What?”, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. I’m Katie, joined by Chris and John.
Christopher Penn 00:38
Hello.
John Wall 00:39
There we go.
Katie Robbert 00:40
Oh, got it. John is on location today.
John Wall 00:44
I know. I feel like I’m in. I need to get Jack Bauer to rescue me from this terrorist situation.
Katie Robbert 00:52
You know, or just, you know, a shared work collocation or space. This week, we are continuing our summer makeover series because who doesn’t love a makeover? And it’s summer. So we are taking the opportunity to not only show you what you can do with the 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 because it doesn’t matter, we’re using my website. We have done previous episodes, which you can get on Trust Insights, AI, YouTube, about setting up a website, all of that good stuff. Mostly, I have a website so that nobody else can claim my name as a URL. And then we decided to put some stuff on it.
Katie Robbert 01:47
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 and how we’re going to use generative AI for very basic web design. 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?
Christopher Penn 02:27
Well, you know where we’re going to start.
Katie Robbert 02:30
I know where we’re going to start, but I want to hear it from you.
Christopher Penn 02:32
We’re going to start with the 5Ps. We’re going to figure out what is your site supposed to do. So let’s take a look at it real quick here. This is katierobert.com, right? And this is some nice stock art of an espresso cup, some random plant in it. I think it’s supposed to be a Mac. If it is, it’s got the wrong number ports on the lower hand side.
Katie Robbert 02:54
I don’t think anybody notices besides you.
Christopher Penn 02:57
No. And that’s, I mean, this is it. So it’s using the 2025 theme, which is the stock out-of-the-box WordPress theme. We’ve got some basic stuff here, but this is it. This is Katie’s site. So what is this supposed to do? What is the site supposed to do?
Katie Robbert 03:17
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 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 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 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’s an extension of our about us, you know, with the goal of someone wanting to bring me on to consult with their company.
Christopher Penn 04:15
Yeah, consult their company in any number of fashions, from the bespoke consulting to coming in to do a training or a workshop 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 get things in 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’ll pass it back to you just for your hot take.
Christopher Penn 04:57
When you talk to our buyers and they’re talking specifically about like AI strategy, we have the new AI Ready marketing strategy kit. John, what do people say? They, they need to know to hire someone like Katie?
John Wall 05:16
Yeah, it’s a great question because, you know, if they take the resource kit, those get thrown into two buckets, right? There’s the people that are just going to 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 the best approach for this is to make sure that there’s enough resources out there that showcase what Katie’s done. And, you know, what kind of services we provide, really just get as much stuff out there as you can.
John Wall 05:51
And I kind of go back to that old UX 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 Katie 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 a list of all the possible things and then determining whether those stay on site or just get redirected to stuff that’s updated more frequently. But all that stuff rolls up into the purpose.
Christopher Penn 06:36
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 OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, 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 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 the best practices are. A lot of people, and I know this is going to 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.
Christopher Penn 07:25
If you’re not even competent, best practices will get you there. And so I think that’s a good place to start.
Katie Robbert 07:32
You know, it’s. And without getting too far off topic, I really, I feel like best practices are just a set of expectations, 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 going to 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 warm-up is going to look different. So the best practice is to warm up.
Katie Robbert 08:16
What you actually do is going to differ case to case.
Christopher Penn 08:21
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, you know, open up your phone, start a voice memos app and yell something like this just to the air. I have a CEO who has her own website, Katie, right. She’s the CEO of Just Insights. You know, spend some time on who is Trust Insights, what to do. Katie’s goal for her personal website is to attract workshop and consulting gigs. She wants to attract high-value clients to hire Just 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.
Christopher Penn 09:02
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 need the kind of AI consulting that she can deliver. She just created the AI Ready marketing strategy kit, right, which you can get at Trust Insights AI Kit totally free. We can include a copy of that in this later on. So we need to redesign this website to reflect the kind of clientele that Katie wants to attract. We need to think about things like messaging and design and graphics and fonts and color schemes. All these things that influence our decision-making process suddenly or obviously, right? Like, “Hire me.” A big button says “Hire Me” would be one of those things. And we’ve got a lot of information, right? We’ve got top podcasts and YouTube videos and stuff.
Christopher Penn 09:51
We got a live stream every week. We have tons of downloads. We have Katie’s LinkedIn profile. We have all this stuff. Katie is the pioneer of the 5P framework, right? So we want to feature that on the website and things. And so I did exactly this. I foamed at the mouth 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 took your LinkedIn profile, the AI Ready Success Kit, right, and that long prompt, and I said, “Okay, build me a website redesign guide for Katie specifically.” And of course, it came out with 27 pages of recommendations for design for the content. You have the typography, the imagery, the graphics, and all this stuff that, yes, I could have done myself. I did not have time today.
Katie Robbert 10:47
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, 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’s fantastic.
Christopher Penn 11:25
Yeah. So it says here the dominant color should be a deep, sophisticated blue, navy, Oxford blue, Prussian blue. That establishes an immediate foundation of trust, stability, and corporate authority. Signaling services offered are serious and reliable. Very, very buttoned up.
Katie Robbert 11:40
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 a deep, sophisticated blue, I would go with a deep, sophisticated green, you know, so that would be like, you know, a hunter green, for example. 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.
Christopher Penn 12:19
Okay, so we’ve got the green there. We’ve swapped that in. We have typography, classic serif font, body text, high-legible sans-serif font like Lotto or Open Sans typographic hierarchy. 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. All I’m going to do here, very simply, is I’m going to open up my Snagit utility. I’m going to record a region of the screen and say, let’s record this. Turn on screen recording and scroll. Look at the blog. That doesn’t work.
Katie Robbert 13:08
It does work. There’s nothing on it.
Christopher Penn 13:11
That link at the bottom doesn’t even work. That’s a problem. There’s the about page for Katie. There is this blog which. So the links at the bottom are there. And let’s look at the contact. There’s a croissant.
Katie Robbert 13:30
Kind of goes with a little coffee thing.
Christopher Penn 13:32
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, we’re going to go into our Google Drive, go into our recent, and pull in Katie’s actual aspirational guide, and I’m gonna say, score the site based on the different components of the guide. 0 to 5 is the best alignment and 0 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, 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 the HTML? You can’t.
Christopher Penn 14:44
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. If you want to cover things like the graphic design, you have to provide images. They can understand that better than HTML itself, which is not intuitive to us as humans. But that’s how they work.
Katie Robbert 15:09
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 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.
Christopher Penn 15:38
Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t a zero. No, it wasn’t a zero. Pat yourself on the back.
Katie Robbert 15:43
Take the win today.
Christopher Penn 15:44
Take the win. So we have foundational positioning, score of 1. Zero on core messaging, zero on offering structure, one on IP, zero on content strategy, a two on layout and aesthetics. Good job. One on information architecture. Final score. Okay, this is a complete. This is why we’re here. 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 an hour to implement? We’re going to be. We’re going to be real aggressive here. Like, yeah, this is worse. Practice by, like, actually, please do take your time. Not say, “Give me the easy stuff.” Easy, important stuff.
Katie Robbert 16:47
Yeah, no, you really want to, you know, think through, you know, 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 last week on the live stream, we were looking at some things that 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.
Christopher Penn 17:33
So priority one, fix the first impression homepage headline and image says, “AI strategies, leadership, not just technology.” I think that actually is really on the money. Okay, what do you think? Do you like “Transforming Your Business with Governed AI?”
Katie Robbert 17:50
I hate anything about transforming.
Christopher Penn 17:56
Let’s take this and go into your site. Let’s go to the pages, let’s go into the homepage, do a quick edit just on that headline and save. Implementation number one is done.
John Wall 18:17
That’s it. Three points. Ching, ching.
Christopher Penn 18:22
Another thing that we should do is we should say, what features in WordPress? Because this is a WordPress site. What features are we not using? 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, 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. Go back. And this is Dashboard Home 6.8.2. This is WordPress 6.8.2. And now those of you who have a WordPress site that has an admin panel for the database, the options table is basically the configuration.
Christopher Penn 19:43
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’s in the site.” What do you think? We’ll see.
Katie Robbert 20:03
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?
John Wall 20:11
We have one that we had run for a previous makeover. So we do have at least something that perfect, you know, going from zero.
Katie Robbert 20:19
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.
John Wall 20:27
And we’ll see site upgrade. Yeah, we’ll have to get a designer to run with that one. Not gonna that. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make my priority list this quarter.
Katie Robbert 20:37
That’s fair.
Christopher Penn 20:39
All right, Katie, you have power. You have powerful premium tools installed, but they are significantly underutilized. You have Rank Math Pro, the great SEO toolkit. You have Google Sitekit. Here’s the website theme with changing the positioning on the site tagline. You’ve got several active plugins. Rank Math Pro is active, and you have set the very basic person scheme. The massive opportunities it’s supposed to do. Actually, all the highly technical stuff for you strategies, the titles are too generic. Key opportunities and redundancies. Your site has conflicting, redundant tracking. There’s analytics overload. You have Matoma, which that’s fine. We normally install Matomo as a backup. Update the site identity, configure Rank Math Pro, simplify your analytics. No, we’re not going to do that part, but we will get rid of the duplicate Google tag manage plugin. Okay, now let’s talk about the design stuff.
Christopher Penn 21:37
This site uses 2025. 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.
John Wall 22:42
But WordPress, especially if you upgrade the theme and you have made customizations to the theme, WordPress goes, “Sure, new theme,” and deletes all your work. You’re like, “Well, I guess we didn’t really need to work on our design then” because that one very badly. The solution is to make what’s called a child theme, which has all of your customizations but is independent of the parent theme. Let’s see, it says first create it as a child theme, then create the stylesheet, and then create the theme name and template. Create the functions file. This is a lot of work.
Christopher Penn 22:57
This is the litmus test for a real web designer. You know, 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, you know that you need to find somebody else because this person is not going to be able to get the job done.
John Wall 23:52
Yeah. So I’m going to complain about it. I’m going to 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, 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. What we’re doing here is we’re saying.
Katie Robbert 23:55
No, I’m not doing that.
Christopher Penn 23:59
You do that.
John Wall 24:07
Do you have to say, “Do this in the canvas”? If you click the canvas button, yes.
Christopher Penn 24:08
For Gemini, sometimes it just disobeys. It can be really annoying.
Katie Robbert 24:33
Even. It is like having a child.
Christopher Penn 24:35
It is in a lot of ways. Here’s our work plan to build these files. Now it says here is your shell script to actually do this for you. If I copy the contents of this and let’s start a new folder on my desktop here called Katie’s site. Let’s go ahead and open up a shell, and we’re going to make this thing called Touch KD site.sh, which is the shell script. Let’s put this into a plain old-fashioned text editor, nothing fancy, and hit save. Now make sure we can run it. We run kdesite and see what happens. It says, creating a new child theme created on my desktop. I’m not sure why I created on my desktop. We got to go find it. There it is. There’s the new child theme. There’s a functions file and a style file.
Christopher Penn 25:37
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. 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 a style or styles style CSS file in the canvas so I can copy and paste it. So again, we’re going to tell it. You do this thing. I’m not doing this.
Katie Robbert 26:21
I actually ran into this earlier with 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 got to do the whole thing.” And it was like, “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 him, 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.
Christopher Penn 26:57
That’s all models. Again, they’re probabilistic tools. And I have had the experience where if the system itself is a heavy load, it’s just like, “Nope, I give up, I’m not doing it.” You will also see it lose cohesion in. When you’re. When your chat history is getting too long. So this is especially problematic. You’ll see this in Gemini when you’re in developer mode. You will see once it gets to a certain token count, it just loses its mind. I don’t even remember what the web is anymore. It just overloads because of a variety of math issues. That’s good. What about the contents of functions.
Christopher Penn 27:58
PHP? You made that an empty placeholder 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. Functions acts like a mini plugin, just like.
Katie Robbert 28:08
You are correct to ask.
Christopher Penn 28:11
Of course I am. Do the actual work that I asked you to do. Open that up, copy the contents. Let’s go into the functions file now and actually paste this in so that it works. Now, if we did this right, which is a big if, I should be able to go to Katie’s site and 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. Won’t let me drag and drop it in.
Katie Robbert 28:52
That’s really stupid because I don’t know if it’s zip.
Christopher Penn 28:55
Is it there? It is. Simpleth. Let’s see if this works. Install now. Activate the 2025 child and let’s see if it completely wrecked your website.
Katie Robbert 29:14
I mean, we started at a five. Hey, that’s something.
Christopher Penn 29:20
That’s something. That’s actually not bad. I mean, it’s, I mean, it looks.
Katie Robbert 29:26
Super different, but it’s not bad.
John Wall 29:29
Awesome that it’s just not broken. When you get a broken page, you’re.
Katie Robbert 29:33
Like, again, that’s a win. So Chris, you get the pat on the shoulder now.
Christopher Penn 29:41
Now we need to figure out what to do about this header image because, yeah, that is a bit on the bland side.
Katie Robbert 29:49
Well, 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.
Christopher Penn 30:05
Okay, so I’m going to say, I’m going to turn off canvas. I’m going to say, based on the style guide and your ability to generate images with the Imagen or model, can you create a new header image for Katie’s site that matches the requirements of the guide? The guide was pretty clear. It told us like, “Hey, this, that potted plant thing 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.
Katie Robbert 30:36
This, this should be interesting because there’s nothing about, as far as I know, there’s nothing about me personally in that knowledge block. So it’ll be. I’ll be interested.
Christopher Penn 30:48
How’d your LinkedIn profile.
Katie Robbert 30:49
Oh, okay, well. But still, that’s not a lot about me personally.
John Wall 30:53
No, I’m betting on a wizard picture you like.
Katie Robbert 30:58
If it does, then we’re putting it up there.
Christopher Penn 31:03
Oh dear. Oh, I specified Imagen for dang. Might take a little while.
Katie Robbert 31:11
I don’t know what that means.
Christopher Penn 31:13
It’s there. What the heck is that?
Katie Robbert 31:18
Not quite a wizard, but a little bit mystical. It’s not usable, but I don’t get it. The design visualizes themes of strategy, data, and human-centric connection in a sophisticated manner.
Christopher Penn 31:36
Buzz. By having a person with a bunch of graph charts and like tentacles.
Katie Robbert 31:43
So. Oh, that. Well, see, I can’t see it clearly. Is that a person?
Christopher Penn 31:46
It’s the golden child.
Katie Robbert 31:49
Oh dear. Oh, no, no.
Christopher Penn 31:59
Let’s say, okay, that image is completely inappropriate for a variety of reasons. A variety of reasons. So what should we tell it?
Katie Robbert 32:14
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.
Christopher Penn 32:35
Okay, what else?
Katie Robbert 32:39
I think the color story is good. We want to keep that. I don’t want the system to try to visualize strategy and data.
Christopher Penn 32:53
Okay, what should it visualize?
Katie Robbert 32:59
Puppies? It should, I mean, it should visualize. It can visualize human connection, you know, more holistic. You know, being in the world, being in nature, like, it’s a huge. 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, and I’m like, this could go really wrong.
Christopher Penn 33:38
More sensicals.
Katie Robbert 33:41
This is not that kind of website, sir.
Christopher Penn 33:46
Next week on Summer Makeover, Katie files.
Katie Robbert 33:50
Against a legal battle. How to defend yourself in the court of law.
Christopher Penn 33:56
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. 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 is 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. Can’t understand.
Katie Robbert 34:35
Right.
Christopher Penn 34:35
So let’s see. We have the focus conversation, the journey. So it gave us two concepts. It didn’t actually generate the images. Do either one of those makes sense?
Katie Robbert 34:48
The image emphasizes a personal connection and the act of guidance in a calm, natural setting. I mean, that could be anything. This option has a wider perspective, hiding a path ahead and reinforcing the idea of a guided. I would go with option two because it really is more of a journey versus a one-on-one. So I’m not coaching. And so I don’t want that. 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.
Christopher Penn 35:26
Let’s see if it can. If it will actually obey or we’ll have to switch tools. It might actually obey.
John Wall 35:42
Go ahead.
Christopher Penn 35:43
Go ahead, John.
John Wall 35:44
I was just gonna say I was wondering if we’re gonna get a Journey album cover here.
Christopher Penn 35:46
This is very possible. Okay. Since you can’t seem to generate the image, give me a prompt for Imagen for that I can copy and paste. That will give me the image for option two. So we’re just going to ask it for its prompt. Because it can’t do it today for no clear reason. Oh, Google.
Katie Robbert 36:18
But I think, you know, this is so one of the topics that we talked about like in the newsletter this weekend 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 going to 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. And so I think that this. I’m actually glad to see some of this. 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.
Christopher Penn 37:02
Huh. No words, no text. No. Why is it? Oh, it’s. This is a website header image. Let’s just call this a hero image. Let’s see.
John Wall 37:19
I like how you do rootangs for the children.
Katie Robbert 37:27
Now I’m looking at. I almost want to do a picture of me talking to me just to throw people off.
Christopher Penn 37:36
You could. I know, I mean that’s not horrible. That’s an improvement.
Katie Robbert 37:44
You know, 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.
Christopher Penn 37:54
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 homepage itself, do a quick edit here. Now trying to figure out how in the world the blocks work on this thing because I haven’t the foggiest. Oh, there’s the image. Replace the image media library. No, I guess we’re uploading.
Katie Robbert 38:35
Oh yeah, see it was a stock image from WordPress.
John Wall 38:39
Yeah, that’s like the 2022 one or whatever.
Christopher Penn 38:45
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.
Katie Robbert 39:09
Now, just this is my curiosity. I’m not asking that we fix it, but why are there such wide margins on either side?
Christopher Penn 39:15
That’s theme.
Katie Robbert 39:17
Okay.
Christopher Penn 39:18
And that’s fine.
Katie Robbert 39:20
Okay.
Christopher Penn 39:21
We just have to specify the stylesheet.
Katie Robbert 39:23
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 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.
John Wall 39:49
It looks good on mobile too. That’s the other.
Katie Robbert 39:52
Oh, look at that, John.
John Wall 39:53
Narrow layout is good for phone.
Christopher Penn 39:59
Let’s see, there’s. There’s some. I don’t know where that came from. Well, that’s another stock image.
John Wall 40:05
Oh, that’s stock, really, is it?
Katie Robbert 40:07
Yeah, I think so. It’s either a stock image or that looks. WordPress might have had an AI built in. And I was like, “Yeah, give me a nature scene.” So this content is the exact same that’s on the homepage. So you’re getting it twice.
Christopher Penn 40:28
Got it.
Katie Robbert 40:29
Which is.
Christopher Penn 40:30
No, it’s different. It’s different.
Katie Robbert 40:32
Good for me. That’s another pat on the shoulder.
Christopher Penn 40:37
Let’s see. So here’s your podcasts.
Katie Robbert 40:39
This should go right. These links, I think are fine because these are accurate. So it should go to In Ear Insights. It should go to So What? And then punch out.
Christopher Penn 40:49
Yeah, only the Trust Insights one is actually broken.
Katie Robbert 40:54
Man, John, I was so close. I. I thought I had at least one page that worked correctly.
Christopher Penn 41:00
There we go. Save. One of the things that we should probably put on here, and it doesn’t have to be a right-now thing, would be clips of you speaking. So we have 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 that, you know, perspective would be a good thing to have on here.
Katie Robbert 41:31
Well, we wanted to have a lot of footage of me, but I had to fire my videographer because his camera kept failing.
John Wall 41:40
Incompetent fool.
Katie Robbert 41:45
And for what it’s worth, that videographer was John, God bless your soul. You tried so hard, but every single time 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.
Christopher Penn 42:08
Okay, so we’ve got the color. So let’s actually do this. Since we’re almost at 40 minutes, let’s take the site now. Go back to the site here and just make sure. We’ll just hide this bar here. I’m going to go back to Snagit and let’s do a capture and specify this window. Begin recording. And let’s see. And now turn this off. And we’re going to have.
Katie Robbert 43:44
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. Let’s see if we improve things at all. Let’s get a six out of 60.
Christopher Penn 43:46
I mean, a six would be great.
Katie Robbert 43:48
It would be an improvement.
Christopher Penn 43:49
It would be.
John Wall 43:51
It’s like move that bus.
Katie Robbert 43:53
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?
Christopher Penn 44:45
I have an answer for you. That looks a lot like a big pile of code. 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 want to.
Christopher Penn 45:31
Write it again. So I just drop 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 post schedule for these weekdays.” I’m just going to start slotting in these posts. And it just does the thing. I gave it the categories I wanted it to choose. I gave it. There’s an integration into a local language model. 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.
Katie Robbert 45:52
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 codified?
Christopher Penn 46:12
Yes, you should. Because in the age of AI crawlers, you’re basically doubling up on that information on a different domain name.
Katie Robbert 46:21
Okay. I mean, I have almost four years’ worth of weekly posts, so yeah, that needs to all get up there.
Christopher Penn 46:32
Yep. And again, that’s something that you might be able to automate you. If we’ve done a good job, and I hope we have. If we’ve done a good job 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 Katie’s site.”
Katie Robbert 46:54
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 going to show up as Kelsey’s.
Christopher Penn 47:08
Oh, well, congratulations. Your site has gone to 15.
Katie Robbert 47:14
Double digits, baby.
Christopher Penn 47:16
Foundational strategies, now three core messaging is a three-offering structure. Still not there. IP still not really there. The black and white palette. Yeah, but we got the imagery. We improved the imagery, got some improvement on the layout, structural CTA. So yeah, it’s. It’s better.
Katie Robbert 47:32
All right. What’s worth nothing is functionally worse. Amazing.
Christopher Penn 47:36
Exactly. So in 47 minutes, with generative AI, with data that we already had, and with a deep research guide, we’re able to make a 3 to X improvement on JD’s website.
Katie Robbert 47:51
Not a lie. Yeah, I mean, that’s a true claim.
Christopher Penn 47:57
It is. Use generative AI to 3X your personal website. There’s the tagline for the show, you.
Katie Robbert 48:03
Know, so obviously there’s more work to do. 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, you know, the upcoming course that’s going to be based on the Trust Insights AI Kit, which you can get at Trust Insights AI Kit. I highly recommend you get it. 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.
Christopher Penn 48:46
I mean, selfishly, if you want to pay for the course, that’s fine with me.
Katie Robbert 48:49
Oh, well. Well, they don’t really have a choice.
Christopher Penn 48:52
Exactly.
Katie Robbert 48:54
But the point being is, like, now I feel like I have a better sense of what I could be doing with that website, whereas before I just kind of looked at it like it’s my name.
John Wall 49:06
I got a website check.
Christopher Penn 49:09
Exactly. So one of the things that we’ll want to look at offline 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 Corner Office,” which is the same exact content, just in a different format. So I could have generative AI splice that up and just start scheduling, you know, one every weekday. With three years’ worth, you’d have what, three years? Yeah, well, yeah, you have, what, one.
Katie Robbert 49:37
A week for three years? So I have 150 posts, right, 150 posts.
Christopher Penn 49:42
So if you would then do weekly on your site, you could get a couple years of. No, you could get what, 50 weeks or so anyway, you get to get a lot of content scheduled on there for the next however long, at least year.
Katie Robbert 49:56
So not only can AI not do math, but Chris Penn can also not do math.
Christopher Penn 50:00
I. Yeah, my brain is not in math mode at the moment. But the other thing that shocked me because I’ve never actually done it before was how easy it is to create a WordPress child theme. Like, “Oh, that’s it.” Like we just made one in. In literally minutes.
Katie Robbert 50:13
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 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.
Christopher Penn 50:44
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 it was not as complex as I imagined it to be.”
Katie Robbert 50:55
Well, but I think that’s true of a lot of things.
John Wall 50:58
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. Now you need to, like a child, you got to sit and take care of it every time there’s an update to make sure that you’re getting that update. 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.
Katie Robbert 51:19
Not that you’ve been there before.
John Wall 51:21
Personal experience with all of these pain points.
Christopher Penn 51:24
Exactly. All right, folks, that’s going to do it for this week’s episode. Thanks for tuning in and we will talk to you all on the next one. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights AI TI podcast and our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights AI newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free analytics for Marketers Slack Group at TrustInsights AI analytics for marketers. See you next time.
|
Need help with your marketing AI and analytics? |
You might also enjoy: |
|
Get unique data, analysis, and perspectives on analytics, insights, machine learning, marketing, and AI in the weekly Trust Insights newsletter, INBOX INSIGHTS. Subscribe now for free; new issues every Wednesday! |
Want to learn more about data, analytics, and insights? Subscribe to In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, with new episodes every Wednesday. |
Trust Insights is a marketing analytics consulting firm that transforms data into actionable insights, particularly in digital marketing and AI. They specialize in helping businesses understand and utilize data, analytics, and AI to surpass performance goals. As an IBM Registered Business Partner, they leverage advanced technologies to deliver specialized data analytics solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients across diverse industries. Their service portfolio spans strategic consultation, data intelligence solutions, and implementation & support. Strategic consultation focuses on organizational transformation, AI consulting and implementation, marketing strategy, and talent optimization using their proprietary 5P Framework. Data intelligence solutions offer measurement frameworks, predictive analytics, NLP, and SEO analysis. Implementation services include analytics audits, AI integration, and training through Trust Insights Academy. Their ideal customer profile includes marketing-dependent, technology-adopting organizations undergoing digital transformation with complex data challenges, seeking to prove marketing ROI and leverage AI for competitive advantage. Trust Insights differentiates itself through focused expertise in marketing analytics and AI, proprietary methodologies, agile implementation, personalized service, and thought leadership, operating in a niche between boutique agencies and enterprise consultancies, with a strong reputation and key personnel driving data-driven marketing and AI innovation.
Newsletter
Podcast
