Dear MaiNetCare customers,
When I asked the AI to help me with my Christmas newsletter, I ended up with the following:
It started harmlessly with the request "Please write me a Christmas greeting for an annual review to my customers". After 0.01 seconds, ChatGPT pulled the following text out of its virtual jacket. The speed suggested that several greeting card writers had obviously already had this thought:
Subject: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from [your company]
Dear customers,
During this reflective time, we would like to take a moment to pause and say thank you. Thank you for your trust, your loyalty and the inspiring collaboration we have enjoyed over the past year. (... BlahBlahBlah here I cut out the rest before you fall asleep)
It was just a typical snoring text, the kind you throw in the bin a hundred times before Christmas.
The whole thing then went back and forth a lot (in the meantime I would have written my own text by now) and each text read increasingly arbitrary. I decided to drastically change the input and now I wanted a healthy mix of self-promotion for the company, pop lyrics from the 70s, the energy transition (which should never be missing) and a Christmas message.
The result:
Dear customers,
"Hossa, Christmas time, so bright, so far,
Fiesta Navidad, glamour and joy everywhere.
Under the Christmas tree, ohoho, so fine,
with SEO the online appearance shines.
Website performance, fast and strong,
like the energy transition, it makes our market.
Through the night, ohohoho, we sing and laugh,
Hossa, Christmas, let's make merry.
Merry Christmas and a new year, ohohoho,
with hossa and happiness, so wonderful!"
With best regards,
...
Not even Christian Anders and Rex Gildo can beat that. And as the icing on the cake, I asked Chat to illustrate this poem. I'll just leave it there and change the subject quickly.
What topics will we be dealing with next year?
Of course, ChatGPT will remain with us and "AI" (the term is actually very misleading, because it is not intelligence, but algorithmic data processing with many parameters) will also mean many upheavals in web development, as in any working environment.
Where the journey will take us is still unclear. I suspect that in the next few years, the personalisation of websites will become more of a focus and AI will be integrated into the workflow like a normal tool, because websites are becoming increasingly complex and so, of course, are the tools used to build them.
More integration of audio and video as content
The trend of visual content such as videos gaining in importance continues unabated. AI tools have long since arrived here. There are tools that create complete explanatory videos based on a topic, Videos from blog posts or improve existing videos, e.g. for video editing, for the automatic creation of subtitles, for indexing in search engines, etc. If you are interested in video creation or AI tools for video editing, just give me a call and I will be happy to advise you.
Accessible websites are required by law
"You can recognise the value of a society by the way it treats the weakest of its members (Gustav Heinemann)". From the end of June 2025, there will finally be prescribed by law that websites must be accessible. Even if it still takes a while, it is worth keeping this point in mind if you are planning to revise your website.
Modernisation of the page builder we use
The outdated page builder "Beaver Builder", which we used for most of our WordPress websites, is now also getting on in years and is unfortunately no longer as advanced as a modern website requires. After a few tests, we therefore decided at the beginning of 2023 to gradually switch to the Bricksbuilder which enables more modern web programming.
Visibility and content marketing
Google saw the light of day 25 years ago. Yes, it really was that long ago. Even though the company has been criticised by many for its monopoly position, Google has given us the opportunity to find and analyse information ourselves in no time at all. The phrase "Google it" has become a German verb and the sentence "I didn't know" has thus become an excuse. But the facts have to be found in the noise of the ether. We are therefore continuing to strengthen our search engine optimisation services. This year we have achieved really good results and are amazed ourselves at how much a well thought-out optimisation can achieve, even for small websites. Of course, there is also a lot of change happening in this area due to AI. We will keep you up to date.
Expansion of our monitoring tool
In the area of website maintenance, we are currently testing a new application that permanently monitors websites for robustness, recognises errors and notifies us.
The problem with our old application was that it could recognise when a website was down, but not when vulnerabilities occurred that were more subtle, e.g. when individual subpages had broken links or the SSL certificate had failed. This all had to be checked manually.
All in all, there is still a lot to do. Which is not to excuse the fact that I totally failed to write cards in time this year. I actually like handwritten cards, but this year Christmas "caught me cold". So here's my online attempt:
On behalf of all the web gardeners, Mrs Manuela Nagel, Mrs Nana Nkrumah, Mr Tobias Rettstadt and Mrs Giulia Cappello and myself, I wish you a stress-free Christmas season with good health and many wonderful moments for you and your family. See you and hear from you in 2024!
Best wishes and Hossa
Michael May