# The New Era of Web Design Has Just Begun **Channel:** Jennie Lakenan **Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqiY0LAPkSc **Transcript page:** https://www.withtranscript.ai/video/cqiY0LAPkSc ## Chapters - 0:00 — Web Design's Three Historical Resets - 3:43 — Why Story Now Matters Most - 7:06 — Caitlin's Story-Driven Homepage Example - 10:53 — Design Choices That Support Story ## Transcript **[0:00] Speaker A:** The new era of web design has just begun, and most people don't actually understand what it is. Right now, most web designers and most people that are, you know, trying to get a website actually made are still doing it the old way. They are still paying for the look. They're still building a site that looks great, but that does not actually get them any calls or sell their product. They're just doing it faster with AI. Here's where they're really going wrong. It's not that AI changed everything, because honestly, in my opinion, it didn't. It just sped up something that was already happening. Web design has already reset three times, and the fourth reset, the one that's coming now, has very little to do with how the website gets built, and it doesn't really have that much to do with AI, either. I'm Jen Lake and I've built over 160 websites, and I keep over 100 of them running today. **[0:46] Speaker A:** So, I have watched this industry change in real time. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the three times that web design has already reset, what the fourth reset actually is, and what I would do if I were building a website today. So, let's start with the first three resets, because once you see them, the fourth one is kind of obvious. Here's how web design used to work. So, initially, every website was pretty much coded from scratch. A developer would build it by hand, and the design and the coding and the technical side of it was what you were paying for. Then came the first reset, the first big disruption, which was templates. Things like WordPress themes came along, and suddenly, a decent layout that used to cost thousands of dollars now cost just a few hundred dollars. I actually experimented with themes when I first started doing web design about eight years ago, and I realized very quickly that I didn't really like them, because I didn't like that the copy had to fit inside whatever the **[1:41] Speaker A:** template, whatever the theme gave you. You'd write a bit too much for one section, and then it just wouldn't fit into it very well, and so I never really stuck with them beyond a site or two. The second reset was page builders, and Squarespace, and Wix, and the tools like them. Now, you didn't even need to be a developer. You just picked a layout, you dragged your stuff into it. It was a little bit easier to manipulate the sections, and by the end of the day, you had a site that actually looked pretty decent. Both of those resets had already happened by the time I started my business. I tried themes, like I said, and then I ended up switching to building on a WordPress page builder. And I'll be honest, I actually felt like a little bit of an impostor because I thought that, you know, real developers would build a site with custom code. **[2:25] Speaker A:** And then I inherited a few custom code sites uh to maintain, and I realized, "Oh my gosh, these are so much harder to update, so much harder to change the content on, and, you know, the client didn't know where anything was, either." And we ended up, frankly, rebuilding a lot of those sites on page builders so that they would be easier to edit for me and for the client. That's how far things had moved. The way that websites used to get built was now the worst way for them to be built if you're a small business. So, here's what those two resets did. They templatized design. Before, a good design meant something because it meant that someone really had to build it from scratch. After that, a decent website was within most people's budget, but in a way, web designers were still pretty safe because you could still differentiate yourself with a custom design, with the fancy stuff, you know, the animations and the **[3:13] Speaker A:** scrolling effects, and the things that a template couldn't do very well. And then the third reset came along, which is AI, and everyone lost their minds. Tools like Claude can build you a site with all of those things. You describe it in a sentence, and then you have it in just a couple of minutes. And it seems kind of crazy, I get it. But what I want you to understand is that this is not really a new thing. It's the third reset of something that was already happening, and that's the templatization of design. It just kind of templatized the last part that was still mostly custom. **[3:43] Speaker A:** So, now that you understand the three resets, here's the part that I think really matters. Back when websites were built from scratch, an impressive website was a signal. It meant that the business cared, it meant that they had money to invest in how they showed up, and that they invested in their product or their service. It was basically a proxy for, "This is a real professional business. Then templates came along and those kind of became the baselines, so the signal moved to more custom things. And then then that became the baseline, too. And now we're in this era of, you know, crazy animations and motion everywhere, and that's about to become the baseline, as well, because **[4:18] Speaker B:** AI made it so. And if you don't know what you're doing, then you end up with this website that's very generic that any seasoned web designer, and frankly, I think even laypeople these days can tell is AI-generated. It's just obvious. And to make an AI site that looks very unique and not generic actually takes a lot of web design experience, which kind of defeats the purpose. So, the big animated site that, you know, was supposed to set you apart is now sitting next to 100 other big animated sites that were also generated in just a few minutes. And the visitor might not be able to tell you why, but they get the sense that they have seen it before. And once they've seen it before, it doesn't make them feel anything, and it definitely doesn't make them feel very connected to your business. And in my opinion, that's the thing that people really are missing. **[5:01] Speaker B:** A website's job was never really to make you look cool or make your business look more impressive. A website's job, first and foremost, is to sell your product. It's to sell your service. That's it. And in all the excitement of, you know, being able to build these really cool big animated sites with AI in just a couple of minutes, people have forgotten that that was never actually the point. So, here's what's happening as we head into this fourth reset. Web designers are panicking, and business owners are thinking that, "Oh, I don't need a web designer anymore." So, designers are trying to differentiate by doing more. They're adding more motion and more animation and and things that look more impressive, and business owners are going, "Why would I pay for that when I can do it myself in an afternoon?" And both of them are forgetting the same thing, which is, you know, what this website is actually for. **[5:47] Speaker B:** Underneath all three of these resets, here is what a website was doing in the first place. It was making a stranger feel something about your business in the first few seconds of landing. They were feeling trust, relief, the sense of, "Oh, she gets it." And that doesn't come from how the page looks. It comes from the story that the page tells overall. Some of the best converting websites are kind of basic and honestly, they might be a little bit boring to look at when you first glance. **[6:14] Speaker A:** You won't find crazy wild fonts or animations that are flying around any of them because the website's job is to help the business grow, not to make you think, "Oh my gosh, this designer is amazing." In my experience, the flashy sites were not necessarily the ones that converted the best, but that was just kind of hard to see while flashy was still rare enough to impress the business owner. Now, AI has made flashy free for most people and what you're left with is the part that was doing the work the whole time. And that part is the story, the words on the page and how they're structured together that make the visitor the hero and makes them want to buy from you. And then the few design choices that only make sense for your business, the ones that give the site a DNA that people can feel even if they couldn't tell you why. **[6:57] Speaker A:** Everything else, all the design around that, it really is just the scaffolding that holds the story up. That is the fourth reset. That is the new era of web design. **[7:06] Speaker A:** Now, I know this is all very kind of conceptual, so let me show you what this looks like on a real site because story first can sound a bit fake until you see it. Caitlin is a client of ours, she makes hand embroidered wedding veils in Arizona. She's been featured in places like the New York Times. She's shipped over 12,000 orders to 23 countries and she has brides buying from her all over the world. Here's her site from a couple of years ago, which I pulled up on the Wayback Machine. The headline was crafting bespoke bridal veils and coordinating accessories designed exclusively for your special day. And look, I will say there's nothing wrong with that headline. It tells you what she sells, but every veil shop on Earth could put that headline up and reading it doesn't really actually make you feel anything. It doesn't make you feel very excited. **[7:52] Speaker A:** And to be fair to Caitlin, she put a lot of work already into making this better. She'd already started implementing the story brand framework on her own site at the start of this year, so her copy was already pretty good. She came to us because she wanted it tighter. She knew it could be better and she wanted the design to be so good that a bride lands on the page and cannot help but be obsessed. If you don't know StoryBrand, I'm certified in it and it's basically a messaging framework where it helps you tell the story of your customer as the hero and your business as the guide. And the first question that is always asked is, you know, who is the hero here? Who is this bride really in Caitlyn's case? **[8:31] Speaker B:** She's looking for a veil that matches her wedding theme and she can't find one. She doesn't want something boring. She doesn't want to blend in with every other bride on social media because social media these days is such a like comparison thing when it comes to weddings for good or for worse. But she also kind of worries that a statement veil is going to be a bit too much. And this business believes that, you know, her veil she deserves to have a veil that looks like her. Then we went through hundreds of Caitlyn's testimonials and pulled out things that brides kept saying on their own. **[9:03] Speaker A:** And a word that kept showing up was obsessed. And Caitlyn had she she's like, you know, I used to use that word a lot but I sort of drifted away from it in years past. She'd been using other words to describe her business for a while but her brides had been saying obsessed the whole time. And once we had that word, we needed a villain because every good story has a villain but we didn't want to make, you know, traditional veil designers the villain because plenty of brides love that style and we definitely didn't want to get people's backs up. So the villain instead here was the word basic. So here's the new homepage. Get the veil you can't wait to wear. Our floral embroidered wedding veils are handmade in Arizona to perfectly match your wedding colors and theme. The New York Times logo instead of just, you know, spelling out the New York Times name because people recognize a logo before they've read it. **[9:50] Speaker A:** The 12,000 orders number and then basic doesn't belong on your big day. That line came out of hundreds of real brides and a villain that we had to go and find. That's the story that always was making her brides buy. **[10:03] Speaker B:** And that is our job as web designers now. Find the story, write it down clearly, and then build the design scaffolding that holds it up. Anything on the page that doesn't support the story doesn't belong on the page. Even the testimonials page tells this story. Instead of just having like a wall of quotes, we had the idea to organize it by the questions that brides actually ask. Things like, you know, will this match my wedding? And under each question you've got real brides that actually answer that question in their testimonial in their own words. And for some of them, you know, we used photos of them in the veil with a link straight to the product. And Caitlin's reaction really was my favorite part. She like gasped and said she was speechless when she looked at this design and she said that, you know, obsessed is definitely the right word here. **[10:49] Speaker B:** She's actually already using it on her social media and the site hasn't even launched yet. **[10:53] Speaker B:** And now I know that this is an e-commerce example and a lot of you might be coaches or you might be service providers, but that really is the beauty of storytelling is that it works no matter what niche you're in. So, where does the design come in? Because design really is the second half of a site's DNA. It's just not necessarily the kind that people expect. On Caitlin's site, the design really has one job and that is to get out of the way of the veils. It needs to let the product photos take over visually and the copy stays short enough to just support that and that's it. But sometimes the story needs the design to say something that the words can't say. So, we built a website earlier this year for a clarinet shop and, you know, we've got places on the site where the background texture is actually the wood grain of the instrument. **[11:37] Speaker B:** And the image frames are rounded kind of like the key holes on a clarinet. Now, most people aren't going to consciously notice that, but they walk away with the sense that someone really cared about this site, that it was very intentional and nothing was there by accident. That is what the design is supposed to do. It's supposed to support the story. And these little bits of symbolism are exactly the kind of thing that AI is not very good at, at least not right now. It just doesn't get nuance. It's really great at writing code. It's very good at, you know, average generic things. It's not good at making something that actually stands out, not without a human giving it the idea first, anyway. And that is why these small choices matter so much. When a site looks thoughtfully done, people assume that the business is run the same way. **[12:22] Speaker B:** Frankly, when it looks like AI slop, they start wondering what else in the business is slop, and whether the thing they're about to buy is slop, too. So, if I were building a website today, here is what I would do. The first thing I would do is the messaging work before I touched anything design-related. What that work does is it forces clarity. You really only need to be about 60% of the way sure of who you serve when you start, and then the process really pulls that other 40% out of you. I've had clients tell me that this is a messaging process felt to them like giving birth. It was so so much kind of research and decision-making and effort, but this really is the part that you cannot skip because it's the part that no template is ever going to be able to give you. **[13:02] Speaker B:** If you want to do this work yourself, I do have a free video training that walks you through writing StoryBrand copy for every page on your website, so I'll link that below. Then, once the messaging and the copy is done, the design really then has two questions to answer. What is the site selling? And who is it for? Because that really helps to decide what the design's job is. Sometimes its job is to get out of the way, like with my client Caitlin. If you're selling a product or even a service that's very visual, like speaking on a stage, then the design can kind of step back so that the attention is on the images and on the copy that supports them. Sometimes the design's job though is to make a concept stick. One of my other clients, Karen Somerville, she's a speaker for parents who are anxious about their kids' future, and she has this whole IP built around the idea of a constellation of gifts that your child has. **[13:53] Speaker B:** So, there are actually stars on the site, which kind of echoes her book cover, and it echoes her concept. It's done in a way that's tasteful, it's not matchy-matchy, but it is cohesive, and it helps this idea of the constellation of gifts really stick in a parent's mind. And we had to find a balance here, to be honest. Karen told me on our call that our design review you that if you had asked her earlier, she'd probably have gone, you know, full whimsical on the site with rounded fonts and rounded edges and things like that. And we did mock that up for her, but we both realized that, you know, her audience is are professionals. They're professionals, they're parents. So, the site needed to have, yes, some of those whimsical touches, but it also needed to have enough rigidity and kind of organization to help it resonate with them and feel credible to them. **[14:38] Speaker B:** She recognized that very clearly once we moved past the copy and got into the design. So, that's the reset. What's left is the thing that was never the template. It's the story. It's the handful of design choices that only make sense to you, that make sense for your business's DNA. That's the new era of web design, and it's already started. And if you'd rather have someone to riff with on this, the link to work with me is below in the description. We always start every project with the story, so that by the end of one conversation, you'll have the start of knowing what yours is.