Why we didn’t rely on AI to create our new website and you shouldn’t either

“AI means no more workers.” 

“With AI you can bring your website to market immediately.”

“We are just going to use AI to build out our site.”

Have you heard statements like these when you look into redesigning your website? Have you wondered whether you even need an agency or a design team anymore? 

When we decided to fully redesign our Imarc.com website for the first time in eight years, we wanted to use the best practices that have been driving our website development since the beginning, while also piloting new processes and techniques. Even during the course of this project, the AI landscape evolved. The coding tools got better. Model Context Protocols (MCPs) and Skills enabled us to give our generative AI tools more context.

When it came to our website, though, we knew it was just too important to rely on AI to design and develop it. We’ve been thinking a lot about the dark funnel of the B2B buyer journey—buyers will spend a lot of time on your website before even making a decision to contact you, at which point you are probably on their short list. B2B sales can no longer rely on casual contacts becoming relationships that lead to an RFP. This makes the website experience even more important. Would you rather the site was built by AI or experts with years of experience who know best practices, how to effectively use AI, and can leverage that experience to make your site sing? 

We strongly believe that your website has to represent you and what differentiates you enough to make sure that visitors want to fill out your contact form. We think our process is a good model for any B2B company that wants to redesign their website to express their brand and positioning, and drive conversions and ROI.

“AI is an amplifier. What a business does badly, it makes worse. What a business does well, it makes better.”
–Jeff Turcotte, Director of Engineering, Imarc

An averaging machine

Modern AI can do a lot, especially creating more things, faster. It can write code, summarize information, prototype ideas, and generate convincing imagery at great speed. What it can’t do is understand and relate to who Imarc really is and the message we’re trying to communicate.

Imarc.com isn’t a generic marketing website. No effective website is. Nearly every page is about our people, our clients, our thinking, our opinions, and the work we've spent years creating. When you go to Imarc.com, we want you to understand us, what differentiates us from other agencies, and who we are as people. 

Today, 85% of online content is synthetic, so authenticity stands out. Furthermore, generative AI is an averaging machine—it takes in all the websites on the internet, all the content, and when you prompt it, the reply is built from the most common responses to questions of that type. That’s the opposite of what you need if you want your website to tell your unique story.

With AI design tools, a house style has emerged. You can probably identify an AI image from its diffuse lighting and smooth surfaces. AI-generated websites have a similar look, as instantly recognizable as the greige of a flipped home on TLC. And yes, you can keep prompting, iterating forever, but you can’t guarantee that each iteration will be better than the previous one.

Respect and authenticity

If you pour your heart out to a friend in an email and they respond with an AI generated response, do you feel like they really sympathize? If you ask a trusted mentor for advice, and they feed your question into chatbot and send you back the response, do you feel like they’ve respected your time and your relationship? 

An agency lives and dies by trust. Using AI-generated images, and depending on AI judgement, violates that trust. Our clients need to know that we’re giving their needs our full attention and our best ideas. We want our website visitors to see real people, real offices, real clients, and real work, not fabricated versions, to get to know us as we are.

How we used AI

Our plan was to leverage AI in specific, targeted ways, in the places it could be the most helpful. Although AI wasn't responsible for the creative direction, it proved invaluable throughout production. We used it to:

• Clean up SVG graphics
• Validate custom JavaScript
• Review code for performance and compatibility with Webflow

This allowed us to spend more time refining the experience and less time chasing minor bugs. 

We also used AI to explore options for interactions and motion. Webflow, the platform where we built the new Imarc.com,  already offers animation capabilities, but AI made it easier to prototype and iterate CSS effects, interaction patterns, and animation concepts. Rather than replacing the creative process, it expanded what we could reasonably explore within the project's timeline.

Webflow’s integrated AI helped us generate structured data and AEO/GEO schema markup. Webflow's Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations made it simple to migrate content from our old site without a lot of copying and pasting, or writing API integrations. It also generated image alt text, though we validated that the alt text doesn’t just describe the image, but describes it in context. Other AI tools evaluated our website’s SEO, AEO, and GEO, against industry standards. Tasks like these are repetitive, rules-based, and relatively objective—the exact type of work AI excels at. 

And how we didn’t

This redesign was more than a rebrand or reskin. We wanted to change what our website was saying, and that’s why we began with an ideation phase, to figure out the themes and message of the new website. This can only come from the minds of those who have been building Imarc for years, who understand what makes us different.

As we take our clients through a website redesign project, we always remind them that content is design. That means that everything begins with content. Based on your business goals, what does the website need to communicate? What kind of information are visitors to your website looking for? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to do? 

We answered these questions and wrote the content that would get the job done. Then we created designs that highlighted, enhanced, and dramatized that content. 

This isn’t something that AI can do by applying a standard website template to a copy deck. This is something we do by understanding our brand, how our content projects it, and creating a user experience that guides our visitors so they engage with our story, and want to work with us.

Similarly, we never want to substitute an AI’s judgement for our own. An AI, asked to evaluate something, does the same averaging as when asked to create something. It will compare our website against the median, and point out where we deviate. Instead we use our experience and judgement to critique and refine, and then measure our success with KPIs. 

Looking toward the future

The most exciting applications of AI let us apply our problem-solving skills more quickly and effectively. As part of our process, we’ve always done brainstorming, drawn sketches, and created low-fidelity prototypes to help guide the finished product. We’re using AI to make those prototypes more detailed, so we can gather insights, critique, and direction. 

AI is good at creating one-off elements, but it doesn’t create a solid foundation to build upon. That foundation comes from a group of talented, dedicated experts in their field, using the best tools at their disposal to express their vision. The tools may change, but that truth never will.