A pretty site is not a good site.
And AI will happily build you a pretty one

In ten minutes you get a page that looks better than half the websites out there. A month later you realise you have not had a single enquiry. Below is what sits under the surface, seven mistakes I find on almost every DIY site, and the checklist to run through before you publish.

You open a tool, type “build me a website for a hair salon”, and ten minutes later you have something that looks better than half the websites you have ever seen. The colours match, the typography is lovely, the animations are smooth.

A month later you look at it and realise you have not had a single enquiry.

No wonder. The site looked like a good site. It was not actually a good site — and the difference between those two things is exactly what an AI generator does not know, because it does not know your business.

What you see is a tenth of the site

Looks are what you notice in the first second. That is why they feel like the whole site. In reality they are a layer over a system that has to work in the background — and that system decides whether you get an enquiry or not.

Seven things the generator does not do

These are not theoretical details. I have found every one of them on a site that looked perfectly fine.

1. A form that sends nowhere. The most common mistake and the most expensive one. The form looks right, the button responds, a “thank you” appears — but the message goes nowhere, because there is nothing behind it. The owner spends a month thinking nobody is getting in touch.
2. A field that exists but never gets sent. A variant of the same mistake: the form has five fields, the email arrives with three. The two most useful questions vanish into thin air.
3. A photo straight off the camera. 8,000 pixels and thirty megabytes on a page that displays the image 700 pixels wide. On mobile data that means half a minute of waiting — most visitors will not wait that long.
4. A canonical pointing at the wrong page. It happens when a file gets renamed. Google then indexes the wrong address, or does not rank the page at all.
5. No structured schema. Without it, Google does not know you are a service business, what things cost and where you work. And AI search engines will not mention you in their answers at all.
6. No llms.txt. More and more people do not google — they ask ChatGPT or Perplexity. If you have no file telling those systems what you do and what it costs, they will recommend someone else.
7. Collecting data with no legal basis. The form collects names and email addresses, and there is no privacy policy anywhere. When an inspector visits, that is not a detail.

When doing it yourself is perfectly fine

I am not going to claim you cannot build a site yourself. In three cases, just do it and do not think twice:

• A one-off event — a page for a workshop, a wedding, a concert, that will live for three weeks.
• Testing an idea — you want to see whether anyone asks at all before you spend money.
• Internal use — something only your team will see.

The line is simple: if the site is your main source of enquiries, it is no longer a personal project. Then the question is no longer whether it looks nice, but how much every week of it not working costs you.

What a site must have before you publish it

This is the checklist I use on every site — mine or a client's. If you are doing it yourself, work through it.

• A single h1 that says what you sell and to whom
• A title of 50–60 characters, a description of 140–160
• A canonical pointing at this page's real address
• A form you have tested yourself, and the email arrived
• Every form field actually gets sent
• No photo wider than 2,000 pixels
• Schema.org for your type of business, your prices and your FAQs
• An llms.txt and a robots.txt that allows AI crawlers
• A sitemap.xml with every page, submitted to Search Console
• A privacy policy and an honest cookie notice
• A check on a phone, not just on a computer

What I do and what it costs

A sales page starts at 890 €, a site of up to seven pages at 1,490 €. Delivery takes three to ten days; the price is fixed and written into the quote.

The price covers everything above: sales copy, structure, mobile build, on-page SEO, schema, llms.txt, a working form with a backend, security headers and a privacy policy. It does not include an online shop, multiple languages, a booking system or ongoing SEO.

If you already have a site and just want to know what is wrong with it, there is a website review for 290 € — within two to three days you get a prioritised list of fixes with screenshots. I deduct the fee from the project if you go ahead.