Most of the pieces on this site are written for people who need a website. This one is for the other designers and small agencies who already know the work. You are allowed to grizzle. The inquiries that used to arrive without effort have become rare. People will spend two or three thousand dollars on a phone without hesitation, then treat the same sum for a website as an outrageous demand. The inbox stays quiet for days. None of this is a secret inside the trade; it is simply rarely said out loud on our own sites.
AI has become the latest thing to grizzle about, and that is fair enough as well. It can produce a page that looks finished in minutes, yet still leaves the domain, the hosting, the form that does not send, and the copy that sounds like nobody in particular. The tool is useful. It does not remove the quieter problem underneath: fewer people are commissioning the ordinary small-business sites that used to keep smaller or one-person operations busy.
Saying so will not bring in a client. It might, at best, earn a tired laugh or a sigh from someone else who has been watching the same empty inbox. That is all this is for. The rest of the site can go back to explaining what a working website actually involves. Designers and agencies are still allowed to note, occasionally, that the work has become thinner than it was.
