How to bring your dying website to life

Do you remember the moment when you first saw the home page of Google? It was the time when everyone was building portals - websites where every pixel of your screen was treated as hot property and every pixel was filled with something.

Then came Google and there was just an input text field where you typed a few keywords and in sub-second time, you got back your answer in form of links. Thousands of them. It felt almost magical.

That's what Google did. Everyone else kept building websites the same way. A never ending stream of pages full of content. On occasion, the websites might have a search function as part of the navigation but that was about it.

Then came OpenAI with ChatGPT. Same concept. One field with an 'Ask Anything' prompt. This time you typed full questions, not just keywords. Even better, you could carry a conversation. The output feels almost magical. The machine is talking back to me. Despite all and many of my complaints about ChatGPT, this simplicity brings back the memories of Google search.

Yet, the rest of the websites are still the same. They provide structured content where the company is trying to anticipate what people might be looking for. The content - most importantly - is structured so that it gets indexed and absorbed by Google or ChatGPT in the hope of appearing in the answers.

While others contemplate, I am putting this idea into action for everyone to try.

My dear reader, let me introduce you to a new type of website - a website where you can ask questions which are relevant to you and get answers back that are meaningful to you. A website which learns from its visitors. It learns what people are looking for and seeks content which is relevant to them.

Until now, when a company decides to build a website, it is an extensive and expensive process. Designing pages, deciding on the site structure, authoring content readable by humans and machines. Long and labor intensive process. And the most challenging questions are: what are the keywords people use when they are searching for us, for our solution or for our product? Do you know the intent behind the search? It is surprising how little we know about people who are visiting our websites.

Some of you might know that I started an IT consulting company 30 years ago and as you can imagine over the years there were several versions of the website. Some better than the others. However, after all those years I realized one sad fact. The website I was so excited about was indistinguishable from any other IT consulting company. It had the Home page, Our Services, which companies we partner with and what software we can sell pages. We proudly talked about how many certifications we had and how our people are the smartest. Naturally, there was also a blog and the About Us page. But then, you could change the logo and company name and it was the same for any other IT consulting company.

I realized that it was almost impossible to create content for every possible question, a question in an unknown context. How could one provide useful information without understanding this?

Over the 30 years, we produced hundreds of documents - proposals, white papers, presentations, internal documentation. We had hundreds of customers from small businesses to Fortune 50 companies. The number of projects is in the thousands.

Now imagine that you load this content into your knowledge base (minus any confidential or personal information) and suddenly you can ask questions about our experience within various industries or types of projects. You can ask questions about how we structure our engagements. You can ask ... anything you want, anything which is important to you.

During our tests, people asked questions like 'How can I reduce my IT spend?' or 'What should be the tech stack for a marketing agency?'. Questions I would have answers for but it would never occur to me to build a specific page for.

Another advantage with this approach is that it is much easier to manage the content. On a scheduled basis you review the documents in the Knowledge base. The ones with obsolete information, you delete. You add new documents which better reflect what the current state of affairs is. The benefit? The change is immediate. What's more, suddenly your subject matter experts  in your organization can directly contribute. Imagine when people find or create new content which demonstrates why your company is best in what it is delivering to your customers.

But what about SEO you ask. How do people find a website which has only one page? How will Google and others learn about our website? I am glad you asked.

This is the best part. Every time anyone asks a question, it is an opportunity to generate a landing page for all the search engines to index. Have you ever noticed that when you search, pages which contain your question as the heading come up at the top of the search results?

And now without further ado, I am presenting you with https://pcis.com. It’s now a website where our expertise is a living experience for our customers. A website where we can learn what people are looking for. A website which will help us to spot market trends, before anybody else. It gives us the opportunity to react to market changes almost in real time and quickly adapt our services.

The recurrent pattern? This is another step where we are passing from the era of search to the era of the answer.