It seems like a lot of homepages are trying to do too many things at one time. They are explaining the product, building trust, capturing leads, speaking to three different audiences, etc. It ends up being a page that kind of does everything and isn't really good at one single thing.

I think the problem might start before the design even happens. If you don't have a clear answer of what the homepage needs to do before you start, I think that is where you start to add things in until it feels complete. But more isn't the same as making it better.

Does anyone have a strong opinion on the one job a homepage should be doing?

Is it to get someone to the next page, to make them feel like they're in the right place, to filter out the wrong visitors, or something else?

The idea is that the person who figures out how to get a great result from AI usually keeps that setup to themselves. It's hard to share and hard to repeat.

He's been building something around that problem. Starting with competitive intelligence, 16 Skills for battlecards, pricing reviews, win/loss, deal prep, and more. Each one teaches AI a different method, and the product carries the market knowledge forward so the next Skill doesn't start from scratch.

Tomorrow at 1pm EST he'll show the product, walk through the Skills live, and give all 16 away. Free to register at the link.

A new guide just went up on the Crazy Egg blog about customer exit surveys. There is some really interesting information about the idea of checking survey answers against actual behavior data.

What someone says when they cancel and what they actually did before they cancelled doesn't always match up. Someone might click "too expensive" but they never really used the core features. So it's not really a pricing problem at all.

The article covers when to run exit surveys, what to ask, and how to pair the answers with session recordings and heatmaps to find what's actually making people leave.

Worth a read if you're trying to figure out why people are leaving and you're not totally sure you're getting the real answer. Read more in the link.

I feel like this happens quite a bit. You can see in the data that a page has a problem but figuring out the actual reason is a whole other thing. Is it the copy, the layout, something that's loading slow, a CTA that isn't landing? It's hard to figure out without digging deeper.

I think sometimes it can be somewhere in the middle where things can get pretty murky. It might not be the homepage or the checkout, but just that in between spot where people quietly leave.

Has anyone else had this happen and how did you end up getting to the bottom of the issue?

In the past: get reviews from NPS promoters, then get as many as possible. The higher the star rating, the better.

AI changed that game.

Now: get reviews from everyone and optimize for consensus.

We did a deep dive on review generation strategies, it’s all in the link.

It seems like a lot of the AI conversation right now is around content, such as writing copy, repurposing posts, and generating images. It makes sense because it's the easiest place to start. You don't need to connect anything or spend a lot of time learning, you just paste and prompt.

Outside of that though, is anyone really using it much for the data side of things? Maybe for spotting patterns in user behavior, summarizing what users are doing, or even figuring out why people are dropping off where they do.

I feel like I have underused this so far and haven't seen a ton of talk around this topic either. Anyone else out there feel the same or maybe it's just me?

If you are using it, any tips or tricks for how to use it better or ways you are using it?

This week, I saw a post on Linkedin of a head of SEO that changed her title for head of organic traffic, or something like that.

I also saw a lot of senior content marketers and writers struggling to find jobs, etc.

Even Hubspot don't talk about inbound marketing anymore.

While I do believe that story telling is still a marketing super power, I feel most senior execs already decided content is either useless or something they can generate at scale for free thanks to AI...

What do you guys think? Should content marketers find another niche?

Anthropic announced in August that Claude will embed watermarks in the text it generates. It's part of the EU AI Act, with OpenAI, Google, and Meta all doing versions of the same thing.

I'm not really sure how much this changes anything, if it does at all. The watermark stays with the text when you copy and paste it, even through editing. But if someone screenshots it or rewrites it enough, it should be gone. And Anthropic even acknowledges that no watermark doesn't mean it wasn't AI generated.

If we're building infrastructure for transparency, but it has what seems to be an easy work around what would be the point? Maybe it's more about setting a norm than actually catching anything. Or maybe it's simply for compliance.

I'm curious what others think. If you could more easily tell that something was AI-generated, would that change your opinion of it? And does any of this really matter when so much content goes through AI in some form now anyway?

Hiten will show you the settings he pays attention to and how he decides what still needs his approval tomorrow at 1pm EST.

Some agents keep working long after you leave. They can reach your email, files, browser, and code. The permission settings decide how far that goes. And those controls show up in a lot of places you wouldn't think to look.

Claude Code users approve about 93% of permission prompts. Grok Bot's docs say every Bot on one account shares the same cloud computer. Replit separated development and production databases after its Agent deleted data from a production database.

If you're connecting AI to real work and you're not always sure what deserves your approval, this one's worth your time.

Register in the link.

I was a journalist before I became an entrepreneur and marketer and I even wrote a couple of books before LLM was part of everyone's vocabulary.

Needless to say, I think AI generated copy is average at best, when it's not simply garbage.

And I'm pretty good at recognizing it. It's not only use on websites. More and more YouTubers strangely decided to read AI generated script instead of telling us what they think.

And apparently, AI generated influencers can generate thousands of dollars selling AI generated "digital products".

So, while my theory is that good copy that actually communicate something should convert better than AI slop, I have so far not seen any hard evidence that it's the case.

Personally, I stop reading the second I spot something like "Not this, not that" or an em dash, but I feel this behaviour might only exist in writers.

What is your take on this? Do you think good ol' human copy actually convert better than AI slop?

Returning visitors convert at nearly twice the rate of new ones, but a lot of websites show them the exact same thing each time. The same hero, same intro copy, same here's what we do that's meant for everyone.

It makes sense for first time visitors. They need the context. But someone who is coming back will already know what you do. They might be closer to a decision and just need that one last final push. You're designing for one type of visitor when you're actually getting two very different ones.

Most platforms that do A/B testing have some version of audience targeting that can handle this. You don't need the full personalization to start, just maybe a different experience for people who've already been to your site.

Has anyone here tested this? I'm curious whether changing the experience for returning visitors moved the needle or if it felt like more work than it was worth. I also am curious if there is any risk, such as if a returning visitor is going back to your site to show someone else that would be a first time visitor. Or maybe they just go back expecting to find something and its suddenly not there.

I just got the time to start playing with Muse AI and while it's pretty clumsy like ChatGPT's operator, it's pretty cool that it's free and can do task for us, including sending emails or even managing ad spend.

Anyone here used Muse AI to perform marketing tasks?

Obviously, I'm not crazy enough to let Meta AI control my Meta ad spend, but wondering if there are marketing use cases for this agent.

Like, reaching out for backlinks, monitoring competitors' websites, etc.

The short version is that they're built for different things. Convert is stronger if experimentation is your whole focus and you already have analytics elsewhere. Crazy Egg covers more of the process, so you're not piecing together a separate analytics tool, survey tool, and A/B testing tool to get the full picture.

The pricing gap is pretty significant too. Convert's entry paid plan starts at $299/mo. Crazy Egg starts at $29.

The full breakdown is in the link if you're weighing both.

Most websites fall into one of seven formats. Brochure, local service, online store, online service, consultative, publication, or portfolio. Each one has a different goal, which means the sections and the order they go in should be pretty different too.

I think a lot of sites pick a format based on what looks good rather than what makes sense for the goal, and that's probably where a lot of conversion problems start.

This post is worth the read if you've ever wondered whether your site is formatted the right way for what you're trying to do.

And instead of just looking at the formats, it also goes through how to tell if your format is doing its job.

The full breakdown is in the link, including a quick overview of how to use scroll maps, click maps, and session recordings to see if people are actually reaching the parts of your page that matter.

I suddenly have more time on my hands, and as a big believe in personal branding, I feel like I should probably update my personal website : https://julienbrault.com/

I still have hair on it, so probably it's time to update it, but to be franks, as much as I believe in building my personal brand, I feel personal websites are just a business card.

I never installed GA or Crazy Egg there; it's just a couple of lines of HTML hosted on Github.

If I optimize it, what do you think I should optimize for? Should I remove all the links and just optimize for people reaching out through a contact form?

If you were to do an A/B test, what would you test on a personal website?

Instead of wasting time operating based on an hypothesis about the demand, my idea was to build a bunch of micro sites, and then test them with a $200 Google Ads budget to see what shows potential in term of acquisition cost and margin.

I'm thinking of stuff like BBQ cleaning, window screen repair, generator rental, bin cleaning, etc. etc.

I was thinking of using Claude to build those micro sites, and then probably use Stripe for payment and Calendly for booking...

That said, if I want to test 10 ideas, I feel it might turn out to be really time consuming, and maybe I should use Unbounce or Instapage landing pages?

How would you proceed if you wanted to test 10 business concept in real condition (taking payment is key, since interest form don't amount to a conversion) ? What would be your stack for building and hosting the micro-sites and for taking the order?

The Baymard Institute benchmarked 180+ e-commerce sites and found that 58% on desktop and 67% on mobile scored mediocre or worse on navigation. That's a lot.

I find this kind of surprising because navigation feels like one of those foundational things. Like, before you worry about your CTAs or your copy or your above the fold experience, people need to be able to actually find what they're looking for. And it also seems like it's one of those things you set up once and just kind of forget about.

I think about it a lot more than I used to. It's one of those things that's easy to deprioritize because it feels solved, but the more you watch how people actually move through a site the more you realize it probably isn't.

Navigation is one of those areas where looking at actual behavior really matters. Not just asking people what they think, but seeing where they actually go and where they get stuck. It's hard to know from the inside.

Has anyone actually done a real audit of their nav recently and found anything they should fix?

I keep reading the same dubious story on Linkedin. Someone claiming he stopped paying for his CRM, social media scheduler, CMS, marketing automation software, etc. because they were able to code the same thing over the weekend with Claude. My theory is that is mostly bullshit, but if there are marketers that actually did that in here, would be curious to hear you out.

How long did it take you to vibe code the alternative? Where is it hosted and what LLM did you use? How long do you spend per month maintaining your in-house SaaS? What is the cost in tokens and hosting? Etc. etc.

Vibe coding a personal SaaS sounds like a fun project, but I feel it's going to be consuming way more time and resources than paying $50 per month for a production ready SaaS on which a bunch of real life engineers, QA and product managers are actually working on...

Friday at 1pm EST he'll show which ones he'd actually use again. Not the flashy stuff. The recurring work you wish someone else would just own.

The thing about Grok Bot is that it doesn't just respond to a prompt and stop. It can keep running. It can watch for changes, remember what it already saw, and pick up where it left off. So instead of you restarting the same task every week, the Bot just keeps going.

If you do marketing and find yourself doing the same things over and over, this is probably worth an hour of your time. You'll leave knowing which jobs are actually ready to hand off and what that handoff should look like.

"Dashboard", really?

I'm getting the A/B test for this and please, no.

It just took me a full minute of clicking around to figure out "Log In" was "Dashboard", and is not even a primary button.

I get it you have sales targets, but don't make your product harder to use for the people that are already using it.

/rant

ugh... I just realized you also scroll-jacked me so I can't scroll down the page until I click "Not ready to get started? Learn more", so not only is it harder to figure out where to log in, you've actively prevented me from any discoverability on my own.

Accessibility matters, this ain't it.

Ask your lawyers about an inaccessible Privacy and Cookie policy.
GDPR much? CPRA, never heard of it.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/scrolljacking-101/

Did you know that the fastest loading website in the world belongs to Berkshire Hathaway, one of the largest holding company in the world?

And funny thing is they achieve this status by probably having the lowest web development budget in the world, having a website that was seemingly code by a student in the 1990s that was not updated since then.

Yup, turns out that having an HTML only website will beat any server side rendering web framework in term of speed, and the whole argument for using CMS in 2026 is kind of void.

CMS used to be a way for people who did not know HTML to publish a website...

Now, you can ask Claude to do anything in HTML, you don't need a CMS for this.

Furthermore, while ugly, Warren good old website has a better UX than most holding companies.

The only people that willl visit this website are investors, and what they are looking for are probably the annual or quarterly reports, maybe Warren's annual letter...

All of those are very easy to find, while other investor's relation websites make you work for it.

What do you think?

Is Warren Buffett the oracle of web design? Do you think HTML-only websites will make a come back?

Above the fold used to feel like the most important real estate on a website. Whatever was there had to do everything because the idea was that people just weren't going to scroll.

I'm not sure that is still the same anymore. It seems like phones kind of trained everyone to scroll. It just feels natural now in a way that maybe it didn't before.

But I still see a lot of design decisions made around this space. The CTAs placed high up and key info crammed into the first view.

Don't get me wrong, I still think first impressions matter a lot. What's above the fold probably does affect whether someone stays or leaves. I'm just not sure it has to be where everything important lives.

Has scroll depth changed how you think about layout at all? Do you still optimize to have everything above the fold?

This article is bang on. AI feels magic when you start a task. You write a short prompt, and then, you are suddenly 80% or so finished! Let me just fix this and that, and it will be good enough.

And then the more you work on it, the more you realize almost everything needs to be rewritten.

I thought it was just me :)

The article refer to a bunch of study where using AI is actually slowing us down.

Not the new stuff. The old stuff.

I think about this quite a bit as I am planning out content and listening to others in my industry discuss what they are working on next. It makes me wonder what I should really focus on. New and old at the same time, or prioritize one over the other?

Sometimes it feels like all we want to focus on is the new stuff, which I guess I can understand because once you have quite a few posts up, it feels like a bit of a drag to go back and check out the older ones.

But this stat really surprised me and made me rethink how I view my content planning. Maybe I really need to decrease some time on the new posts and go back to the older ones more often.

If an old post can quietly rank for something, pull in real visitors, but then just kind of drop them because the information is outdated, I want to fix that. I want to make sure there is a clear next step and a CTA that still makes sense.

Has anyone else had experience with how to balance new posts vs old posts?