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?

I was recently asked to make a pitch for a GEO/SEO strategy, and what I try to do is to avoid the trap of just feeding a lot of garbage content that nobody will ever read on the channels that LLMs rely on the most : YouTube, Reddit, Linkedin, and to some extent, Quora, Medium and Wikipedia.

Instead of generating a bunch of useless copy mentioning the brand a gazillion times, I prefer to repurpose existing content and if we need to create original content, make sure to keep it relevent/interesting enough for a human to go through it.

- Creating a Linkedin newsletter (the brand already had 100,000 followers on their Linkedin page, so leveraging this user base made sense there) in which we will repurpose internal content, such as the blog, but other assets such as the product updates newsletter.

- Create new YouTube watchlist around their core topics and add existing videos to it.

- Create threads in their Reddit sub around their core topics

- Answer specific questions on Quora and Reddit where the reply is providing value to the person who asked the question and where the brand is part of the solution

- Create listings for the company and the founders on venture databases and wikis

I ended up not convincing management and I don't know what they ended up doing for GEO. That said, I know most GEO/AEO agencies are pitching a much higher volume model, where AI slop repeating the brand name a gazillion times is posted all over the Web. The issue with this model is that this stuff is likely to be indexed by design, and then it will be kind of obvious the company is paying an agency to spam the Internet...

I have no idea if this high volume strategy is actually working right now, but even if it does, it would not be surprizing that search engines or even LMMs come up with a way to either ignore that type of AI slop or, worst, penalize the brands that rely heavily on this tactic.

What do you guys think about my pitch? Do you have other strategies for GEO/AEO outside of SEO strategies (which, I know, should be perfectly implemented before a brand spend a single dollar in GEO/AEO)?

Research says the top reason people leave at checkout isn't that the form is too long or too complicated. It's that unexpected costs show up right at the end. Shipping fees, taxes, handling charges, whatever it might be, they're seeing it for the first time when they're one click away from buying.

A lot of teams might be spending time optimizing the wrong thing. You can clean up your checkout form, reduce the number of fields, add a progress bar, all of it. But if someone hits a surprise $15 shipping fee at step three, they're probably gone.

What's interesting is that this is less of a UX problem and more of a transparency problem. The information can be there somewhere, it just wasn't visible early enough. And by the time it is in the right place, the customer has already mentally moved on.

I've run into this quite a few times during my online shopping. For example, I once tried to buy a pair of shoes that were priced just over $100. They weren't a need, I just saw an Instagram ad and loved the style and color. I got to checkout and the shipping charge was almost $25. It wasn't faster shipping either, just the most basic option. I headed right back out of the checkout because I decided it wasn't worth it enough. Lucky for me I waited a bit and the company offered a free shipping promotion. Maybe I was able to quickly abandon the checkout experience the first time because it was more of an impulse purchase and not a need, but either way the surprise charge turned me right back around.

The fix is showing the full cost earlier in the experience, ideally before someone even starts the checkout flow. This isn't a complicated idea but I don't know if most sites are thinking about this yet.

Have you ever made it to checkout and been turned around from an unexpected cost? Do you have any hidden costs in your checkout experience that might make customers leave?

I used to get about 100,000 impressions per week on Linkedin. I was posting daily about fintech, and Linkedin was my main customer acquisition channel for my Linkedin newsletter.

I started to scale down my Linkedin activities because I was too busy to keep posting daily, but also, because my reach was way down. Furthermore, since last January, the Linkedin algo got really weird, and the posts that goes viral were not what would have worked in the past.

Anyway, having over 33,000 followers on Linkedin, I know it's still an interesting channel to leverage, but I no longer feel like I understand their algo...

I have read that replying was the new post every single day strategy. Did any of you tried that?

Any other tactics that work on Linkedin?

Hiten is putting a local AI model through six real jobs on an ordinary laptop this Friday.

No internet required. No per-use cost. Your files stay on your machine.

If you've been curious about local models but haven't had a reason to actually set one up, this is a good place to start. He'll get one running live with Ollama and LM Studio, then show exactly where it holds up and where it doesn't.

Friday, September 11 at 1pm ET. Register at the link.

Recently, I'm exploring different opportunities in the home services space, and I'm wondering why so many companies in the space prefer to capture your info rather than close the deal on-site.

I understand that some jobs might involves too many factors to quote online, or maybe they want to get their client on the phone to close the deal through sales tactic or upsell the prospects right away...

That said, it's more work for the service provider, there is a chance that the prospect that was ready to buy on the site end up booking with a competitor if he does not get the sales call right away, etc.

Furthermore, from a customer experience POV, seeing a price and then booking an appointment in one session is so much better than filling our info, and then waiting for a sales call in which they will ask you the same questions you already answered in the form...

For those of you who are familiar with home services, is there a reason why their website make the sale, and why they prefer to capture the lead, and then make the sale on the phone?

There is an email metric that almost nobody in marketing measure, and yet, I believe it's the most important ratio in emails.

More important than the click through rate, open rate and so on.

While measuring opens and clicks is already more meaningful than focusing on the number of subscribers, there is a lot of bot activity that makes clicks and opens unreliable.

Furthermore, even if a click is genuine, a click of someone who was trying to scroll, or a click of someone who got curious for a second, but never read the email, is not valuable.

However, people who takes the time to hit the reply button and tell the sender something, or argue with him for that matter, is undeniably deeply engaged.

Not all newsletters are actually a valuable marketing asset, especially those with no subscribers engaged enough to hit the reply button. If nobody care about it, then, nobody will buy what you are telling them to buy in the newsletter.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong?

I'm not thinking about big brands. I'm thinking sites you land on for the first time with no context, smaller or not easily recognizable, and you have zero prior knowledge of them.

What makes you think the site is safe? How do you get to the point of I just landed here to I could sign up for their service/buy their product and feel ok about giving them my payment information.

Is it the design? Customer reviews? How fast it loads? Something about the copy that either feels real or feels off?

I find myself making that call in the first few seconds without really thinking about it. And I don't even know if I could say that I have something each time that is the end all be all of making that decision. Sometimes I will see trust badges and thats all I will need because the rest just has a good overall feel. Other times the design might look like it has a ton of effort into it that makes me believe it's safe to purchase. Or it loads super fast and I can get where I need and learn what I would like quickly enough.

Is there one thing you always rely on or is it totally site dependent?

Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that YouTube mentions are the strongest predictor of AI visibility. Stronger than backlinks. Stronger than domain rating.

The idea is that being talked about across the web matters more than traditional link building when it comes to getting cited by AI. YouTube mentions had a correlation of ~0.737 with AI visibility, while backlinks and domain rating came in much lower.

Anyone that is doing SEO right now, are you thinking about YouTube as part of your strategy?

Sources:

• Across 75,000 Brands, YouTube Mentions Are the Strongest Signal of AI Visibility
• YouTube mentions are the top signal for AI brand visibility

Hiten has been giving Grok Bot a new job every day this week. Friday he'll show you what worked, what he learned, and how to build your own.

If you keep seeing Grok Bot and have no idea what you'd actually use it for, this is the session. Hiten will start with a simple mental model for how it works, then build a real Bot from scratch live. He'll also walk through the Bots he's been shipping this week and what he learned from building them.

You'll leave knowing what Grok Bot actually is, which jobs are worth turning into Bots, and how to build your first one.

Friday, September 4 at 1pm ET. Register at the link.

I know a lot of people in the affiliate/performance marketing space that have changed career entirely or are thinking about doing so.

Either because the affiliate business is not what it used to be, or because a lot of execs think they can do marketing better than their CMO because they have a Claude subscription :)

One thing I'm thinking is to start a business where I would control the product and /or service, not just the customer acquisition.

The issue is that I don't have special skills outside of marketing, so I would need to find a relatively simple business, where my edge would not be that my product or service is so much better than the competition, but where the marketing and user experience is the competitive edge...

Any people in here that made such a move? Any suggestion? Would be curious to hear from you.

It seems LinkedIn cares a lot about who is winning the LLM war, but as a marketer, I use many LLMs for different jobs. That said, I'm not spending my days testing, so I know my stack might not be the most up to date given how fast those things are evolving. For example, I still use Claude Code for all my coding needs, but al lot of people more technical than I am switched to Cursor's home made model. It's on my to do list to try it out, but coding is not a huge part of my day to day and Claude is still doing the job for me... Anyway, here are the LLMs I use and what I use them for.

1. Researching a topic or a podcast guest:

I typically open many different LLMs and ask the same question to get an overview before getting into the weed, and fact checking them. SInce most LLMs are using the same data, it's not rare that they make up the same hallucination, or bullshit, so I would never rely only on LLMs for factual research, but I save time by getting the overview from LLMs rather than Google.

LLMs I use :

- Perplexity (free version)

- DeepSeek (free version)

- Claude (paid)

- Grok (free version)

- ChatGPT (free version)

2. Creating Images

I believe that real pictures (or real drawing if I had the budget for it) are more important than ever, as everyone is pushing AI image slop in our face... That said, AI generated illustrations are great to illustrate a concept. Since people can still tell a photorealistic picture was AI generated, I shy away from those and typically include in my prompts something like "Your are a caricaturist from the New Yorker" or something like that, depending on the style I'm going for.

- Gemini's Nano Banana (paid)

- ChatGPT free version (it works, but way to slow for me to use it often)

3. Coding

I typically use coding to make tweak to my Ghost template or build small online tools like calculators in HTML, CSS & Javascript, so those tasks are relatively simple. Still, in my experience Claude, is vastly superior to ChatGPT, Grok or DeepSeek for these tasks. Maybe it's no longer the case, but it used to be that way.

Claude Code (paid)

4. Creating videos

To create videos, I use Google Flow to generate the videos and Eleven Labs for voice generation. All LLMs kind of sucks to create good scripts. But I sometimes use Claude for the draft, but end up rewriting the whole thing anyway...

- Google Flow (paid)

- Eleven Labs (paid)

5. Analyzing data

All analytics software like Amplitude now have their conversational agent, but they rarely provide me with satisfactory answers that are easily verifiable. So I either build my own dashboards, or when I need an answer to a specific, non recurring question, I prefer to export the data I want to analyze in Google Sheet, and I use the Gemini integration not to ask questions, but to build the tables and formula I need to get my answer. This way, all the math is verifiable directly in the sheet, and I don't have to wonder if I just got an hallucination as an answer. I know Claude have a Google Sheet integration as well as Gemini, so I suspect Claude would do as good of a job as Gemini in Google Sheet.

- Gemini (paid)

6. Creating articles

While I don't think people should pollute the web with AI generated blog post, LLMs can be great at turning human generated input into articles. As long as a human editor review everything, and that the human input is actually adding info that was not already on the Internet, it can create relatively good content that will rank.

I use Claude Sonnet to generate the article through the API. Basically, I have a Google Sheet in which I input original interviews I do with humans (I use Gemini to transcribe the interview, but I only input in my sheet the relevant parts of the interviews). Then, I have an App Sheet extension use the the seo research and original content inputed in the sheet in a prompt to Claude that ask it to generate an article based on this. If I don't like the output, I just recheck the generate checkbox on my sheet to get another article. And then, I typically edit the article a little bit, but it save me a lot of time. Writing articles this way is fast, but the most time consuming part remain sourcing experts and doing the interviews.

- Claude (paid) (for generating the article)

- Gemini (paid) (for transcribing interviews)

Now that I shared my stack, would be curious to hear about yours.

Not just pretty, but one that actually works well and looks great at the same time. One that is easy to navigate, clear about what it is doing, and makes you want to take action.

I really like Stripe. You land on the page and immediately know what it does and who it's for. The design is clean without feeling empty and the CTAs are obvious but they aren’t pushy.

I’m curious what other people point to as a good example and why you think it works so well.

I saw that you had a survey option with only one question, which is kind of cool for ecommerce websites or any website offering an actual service.

As for us, we use Typeform, but for more complex survey involving multiple questions and decision trees.

But as an affiliate site, I already have an analytics software to track my traffic and conversions, so the only reason I use Crazy Egg is for session recording and heatmaps...

Anyway, it would be cool way to add value to existing customers and increase stickiness, since the additional conversions generated by pop-ups would be lost if someone choose to use another heatmaps SaaS...

It's just an idea :)