684 - Your Website Is Missing Its People
Jens Heitland on why service business websites lose trust when they show no people, and what one company owner changed after a single conversation.
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The Website With No People On It
A few weeks ago, I sat down with the owner of a service company who had just launched a new website. He was pleased, and for good reason. The design was clean, the structure was logical, and the entire site was built with AI tools in a fraction of the time an agency would have needed. As we scrolled through it together, I noticed something he had not. No one appeared on any page.
Websites like this are becoming common. AI has lowered the cost and effort of building a professional digital presence, and that is a real gain for smaller companies that previously could not afford one. The tools are very good at producing polished layouts, copy, and imagery. They are far less able to supply the one thing a service business actually sells: the people who deliver the work.
When I mentioned the absence of people, his first reaction was honest surprise. He asked why he should show anyone at all. I understood the question. Many founders think of a website as a digital brochure, a place to list services and contact details. For a software platform, that framing can work reasonably well. For a company whose teams physically arrive at client sites and carry out work for other businesses, the website plays a different role. It becomes the first place a potential client tries to understand who they will actually be dealing with.
Service buyers buy trust before they buy anything else. They want to know who will turn up, how those people work, and what the company values when something goes wrong. A site that shows only generic graphics and generated text answers none of those questions. The visitor is left to interpret the silence, and interpretation without evidence tends to lean toward caution.
Over time, that caution shows up in quiet ways. Inquiries arrive more slowly. Prospects ask for more references before committing. Competitors with less polished sites but visible teams win conversations they arguably should not. None of this is dramatic, and very little of it is ever traced back to the website. The gap simply sits there, shaping perception without anyone noticing.
There is also an internal effect. When a company doesn't show its people, the team is quietly told the brand exists separately from them. Employees who do the real work rarely see themselves reflected in how the business presents itself. That distance between a company's public face and the people inside it tends to grow when nobody addresses it.
Our conversation lasted about half an hour. By the end, he had decided to add his team to the website, explain who they are as a company, and state clearly what they stand for. He did not need an expensive production. Basic photographs and a few short videos of the team at work would already change how the site is read by someone arriving for the first time.
What I take from this exchange is how easily the human element slips out of view when the tools make everything else so effortless. AI can help a business look complete, yet the sense of being known still depends on seeing the people behind it. For any company that delivers value through people, the website should carry those people, because that is where trust begins for a client who hasn't met them yet.
Highlights:
00:00 AI Website Wake-Up Call
00:24 Why Humans Matter
00:34 Service Business Reality
00:48 Decision to Show Team
00:52 Adding Photos and Video
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Transcript :
When I was meeting with that company owner, we talked about their website and, and he was sharing, "Hey, we just launched a new website. It was completely designed by Claude and son." All AI stuff, obviously one thing I directly have seen is you're not showing any human on your website. And he was baffled , by that and said, "Yeah, but why should I?" And I said, "Because you're a service business. Like, you are doing service for another company, and you're not showing human interaction. So you're a physical business that is doing physical service to other people.
You're not just a digital company that is a platform. So I think there's a human element. If you don't show that, it's a missing piece." And after, like, half an hour conversation, he then decided like, "Yeah, definitely. We need to add the humans. We need to show as well who we are as a team. We need to show what we stand for as a company," and then really making even just basic images or videos inside of the website.