This Website is Written by a Human*

Welcome to the Pragmatic AI edition.

Today marks the start of the next stage for Indulge. Internally, we’ve dubbed it ‘v5’ because it’s the fifth full rebuild of our website.

In 2009 when we launched, v1 was a website built using Flash. Flash has long since been consigned to the history books, and in the ensuing years, the web has evolved beyond recognition.

We now find ourselves well into the AI age.

We thought hard about the theme of the first quarterly edition for our website. We considered the potential AI fatigue that exists in the world. But despite the consideration, it felt wrong for us to start anywhere else.

AI is and will continue to be the single most important development for the work we do day in and day out.

A new type of agency website

I usually refrain from shouting about such things as launching a new website for ourselves. It’s self-indulgent (pun not intended), but in this case, our relaunch feels bigger than just a website.

The project has been driven by two forces:

1. It was time; our brand, our image, and our website no longer reflected who we have become

2. We are genuinely tired of seeing the same agency sites over and over

Let’s tackle point two first.

I challenge you to visit any number of agency websites and find more than perhaps one or two that don’t open with a variation of a lead statement that says:

• “We are the best XYZ agency”

• “We do X for Y”

Don’t get me wrong, saying who you are or what you can do is not a bad strategy, in isolation. But we don’t operate in isolation. We operate in an industry that is awash with agencies of all shapes and sizes. I struggle to tell them apart, so what chance do the companies we hope to work with stand?

The single most valuable thing we have is the expertise in our team. We have, in my view, a uniquely experienced and well-suited specialist group of people on our team.

So, we’ve opted to launch a website that demonstrates the brain power we have on tap, not the lofty claims we can make.

We’ve called the strategy ‘publication-first’. It means that our website is now a publication before it’s an agency site.

Some of our team took convincing, for good reason. There’s the risk that our target audience (you) will visit our site and become confused. Is Indulge a publisher or an agency specialising in financial services?

Our hope is that through the power of the expertise we publish, we’ll demonstrate who and what we are, so we won’t have to be explicit about it at every opportunity.

We haven’t abandoned the agency site model entirely. Beyond the ‘magazine-style’ homepage and edition-led insights, we retain a solid ‘about’ section, and our ‘work’ and ‘capabilities’ sections fill in the information about the work we do.

But the centrepiece is our library of content.

Supporting the launch with all-new content

This change has required an entirely new approach to content. It has required a full rewrite of everything on our website (more on that process below), and it has also involved launching something we’re particularly proud of.

Fin the Week is our new weekly podcast, hosted by the Indulge team and Amelia Slaughter, of radio fame.

Published every Friday morning at 8 AM, Fin the Week is available on your favourite podcast platform, so long as your favourite is one of Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.

Each episode addresses an element of our quarterly theme or something happening in the industry right now. It features guests from across the Indulge team and across the industry.

We want Fin the Week to become a fun way for our listeners to finish the week and learn a little. For us, it provides a way to capture the thinking that goes on within our own organisation.

How do I rewrite a website using AI?

So, we rewrote our entire website as part of the launch process.

I know what you’re thinking; we used AI to do it? You bet we did, but perhaps not in the way you might expect.

I genuinely think the naive approach is simply to ask your chosen AI tool to write pages for you. You’ll end up with words, but they might not be the right words in the right order.

That’s not to pick on AI tools for the act of writing. If you ask a competent copywriter to write you a webpage with nothing more than a couple of sentences to prompt them, they too will produce filler.

My approach to writing with AI as a part of the process is to use AI as your sub-editor. That’s newsroom speak for the person who sits between the writer (who produces the draft) and the final finished product.

AI makes an exceptional sub-editor, and so it was with our website rewrite.

The process to use when rewriting a website using AI

In order to successfully rewrite our entire website, we used four primary inputs:

1. The website discovery outcomes, including the chosen sitemap/information architecture

2. Our tone of voice document (i.e., house style)

3. A planning template for every page

4. A draft for every page

At no point did AI run riot on our site, but it absolutely did work closely with us to prepare the copy for the site.

The website discovery process is our name for the steps taken in carrying out the research needed to plan our website. It’s where we made the decision to go ‘publication-first’. It’s the document I produced to present the strategy to our team.

It was pulled apart, questioned, and it captured information about our market, competitors, and our target audience.

The punch line of the discovery process (and document) is a sitemap. The sitemap describes the information architecture of our website. It’s more than a list of pages; it’s a taxonomy plan and a hierarchy.

This is the first thing that our AI tool (Claude, in this case) was briefed on.

Training AI in your tone of voice

The second step is preparing AI to use your tone of voice. We have a tone of voice document that outlines how Indulge sounds. The best way, I’ve found, to make use of this is to produce a markdown version of your tone of voice.

Markdown is essentially plain text. It’s the format AI tools are most comfortable working with.

In the case of Claude, it’s a simple case of loading the markdown tone of voice guide into the platform as a ‘skill’.

Every time I open Claude to work on Indulge content, I open this skill. That provides the guardrails that enable Claude to be Indulge’s sub-editor, not just a generic sub-editor.

Writing the content

This is the step where, in my experience, most novices start. They open an AI tool, tell it what they would like, and let the AI do the rest. It’s where, forgive me for coining the phrase, AI slop is born.

I managed the process using an alternative approach. Each page had two steps:

1. Write an information/planning page first

2. Draft the core copy for the page

The information/planning page captured all of the core information needed to write an exceptional version of each page:

• What are the core beliefs/viewpoints we need to cover?

• Who are our readers?

• Why does what we’re saying matter to our readers?

It’s essentially a brief for the page. The bullet points you prepare before tackling the sentences and paragraphs. If you list out everything you’d like to address before you start writing, the act of writing becomes infinitely easier and more successful.

The second step is to draft the content. Aside from our case studies, I opted to start entirely from a blank page for every page.

In most cases, the planning process described above meant that starting the process was easy. In certain cases, I suffered from acute blank page syndrome.

AI was essential in both scenarios. When a blank page strikes, providing Claude with all of the inputs (discovery, tone of voice, and notes from the brief) was enough for it to give some excellent start points.

When the draft was easier to produce, Claude was excellent at reviewing each paragraph at a time, offering an appraisal of whether I’ve hit our house style, and offering thoughts on ways to cut unnecessary words or rework awkward sentences.

The takeaway? Claude didn’t write the content on our website, but it was an exceptional sub-editor.

Like a human sub-editor, Claude enabled three things to become true:

1. Our content is of a higher quality than if I worked alone

2. It took much less time to produce

3. Most importantly for me, it stopped me from getting lost along the way

Point three is the point most conversations about AI miss. Yes, it saves time and improves quality, but speaking as a perfectionist, it also protects my mental state.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve gotten lost in a deep piece of work, frustrated with my self-perceived lack of progress. I’ve lost hours, sometimes days agonising over decisions that, let’s face it, didn’t really matter.

AI is my personal sub-editor. I can’t afford a real sub-editor to sit next to me every day, so thankfully, for my happiness, Claude has saved the day.

AI makes me, the human, a bit better.