GoKawiilAll my clients wanted a carousel, now it's an AI chatbot!
2026-03-14 12:55
It always starts the same way. The client pulls out their phone mid-meeting, navigates to a competitor's website, and holds the screen up like evidence. "You see? They have one of those." A little bubble. Bottom right corner. Blinking...
For years, that gesture was about carousels. Every homepage had to have one, big, slow, full of stock photos that nobody asked for. I built dozens of them. They spun. They faded. They slid. Visitors ignored them completely, scrolled past in half a second, and went looking for the phone number.
Then the trend quietly died, as trends do. Not because anyone decided carousels were bad. Just because something newer came along to copy.
Cookie consent banners came next. Every site needed one, even the ones with no cookies whatsoever. Then Google Tag Manager, even for clients who never once opened an analytics report. I asked one of them, eighteen months after launch, if he'd ever looked at the traffic stats. He hadn't. He didn't even remember the login.
Now it's the chatbot.
I've started asking clients a simple question when they bring it up. Not to be difficult, just to understand.
"Do you actually use chatbots when you visit other websites?"
There's usually a pause. Then a laugh.
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