Keeping a human touch in web development

If you're buying a website in 2026, there's a question you're probably too polite to ask: is a machine going to make this?

It's a fair question, so here's a direct answer. We use AI-assisted tools throughout our design and build process. Our terms say so, because we want you to read it before you buy.

The terms don't say what that means for the site you end up with. This post does.

What goes wrong

The worry most people have about AI-built websites is that they'll be broken. Broken is easy to spot and easy to fix.

In practice they come out generic. Ask a model for a bakery website and you get a competent, forgettable page: a hero image of bread, a three-column section about quality ingredients, a warm brown palette, and copy that could belong to any bakery on earth. Nothing is wrong with it. Nothing is yours about it either.

The cause is built into how the tools work. They produce what's most likely, and the most likely bakery website is the average of every bakery website. Average is a good starting point. It's a poor finished product, because a small business website exists to explain what makes this business different from the average one.

Getting a machine to produce a website is nearly free now. Anyone who tells you that part is the work is selling you the easy half. The work is everything that pulls the result away from the average and toward you.

How we pull it away from average

• We start from five distinct directions. You get five real designs of your site in five different styles, and you pick one. A single generated option gives you nothing to react against, and reacting is how people discover what they want. The ones you reject tell us as much as the one you keep.
• We use your words. The text and images are yours. That's listed in what the price doesn't cover, and the exclusion is deliberate. A business describing itself in its own sentences is the strongest defence against a generic site. We can't write those sentences for you without inventing things about you.
• A person chooses the design system. Every style we work in has a real history. It suits some businesses and actively harms others. Choosing one is a judgement about your industry and your customers, made by a person who can explain the reasoning.
• Someone reads the whole site at the end. Machine-assisted work fails as a page that's fluent everywhere and wrong in one place. We catch that by having a person read the finished site as a customer would.

What the tools are never allowed to decide

For some decisions, sounding confident and fluent is dangerous. These tools are very good at sounding both.

Anything we publish that binds us is a human decision, written down and checked against everything else we've published. Prices. Guarantees. Delivery times. What's included and what isn't. Any sentence containing the words forever, unlimited, any time or never. Accessibility claims. Anything about what you own and what you can take with you if you leave.

A guarantee published to a customer in Spain is a garantía comercial. It binds us on the terms in which it was offered, including its advertising, and we're held to the most generous version of what we said. A tool that writes a slightly warmer version of our guarantee has changed our contract.

So every customer-facing promise on this site lives in one register. Adding one means checking it against the promises already there and confirming we have a way to keep it. We've held our own writing back over exactly this. A post on this blog is still unpublished because it made a claim about accessibility that our own accessibility statement didn't support. Both sentences were written honestly, in separate sessions, and they couldn't both be true. The post stays held until they can.

The human touch is a claim about people

Two different claims get sold as one.

"Handmade" is a claim about process, and on the web it's mostly unverifiable. Every studio uses tooling. The ones that say otherwise are either behind or not being straight with you.

Accountability is a claim about people, and you can verify it. Someone specific made the decisions. Someone specific answers when something's wrong, and we can name them. That's what our terms mean by human review. It's also the part that doesn't get cheaper as the tools get better.

It's why the posts on this blog carry a byline. A name is a small thing. It's also a factual claim about who did the work.

What we're not claiming

We're not claiming no machine touched your website. It did, in most of the places you'd expect and some you wouldn't. We think the site is better for it: more consistent, and tested more carefully than a human-only budget would allow at this price.

We're not claiming it's perfect either. It's a website, and things will be wrong with it. What we're claiming is narrower: a person directed the work and read the result, and that person answers for it. If your site says something we can't stand behind, that's on us, and there's a name attached to the sentence.

The companion to this post covers the mechanics: what it takes to sign off on work you didn't personally type, and why most approval of machine output is a rubber stamp.