Journal

Notes on design, the web, and what actually holds up once a site is live.

Is your website invisible to ChatGPT?

More and more people ask an AI assistant to recommend a business before they ever touch Google. If your site is built the wrong way, those assistants can't read a single word of it — and nothing will warn you. Here's a 30-second test you can run yourself.

Richard Gleeson25 September 2026 · 6 min read

Design · 7 min read

Why my site's coral failed contrast, and how I fixed it

rgleeson.com looked fine, but its coral accent failed contrast on every button and band. I measured every piece of text on 12 pages, tested three palettes and three tweaks, then changed the accent. Failing text went from 102 elements to 10.

I audited my own site the way I'd audit yours

A full audit of rgleeson.com, benchmarked against the four web designers that rank first for 'web design Dover'. It scored highest of the five, and it isn't in Google's top 20. Here's the report.

How to prompt AI for a landing page that actually converts

Ask AI for 'a landing page' and you'll get mush. The trick isn't a better model — it's treating the page as a sequence of jobs and prompting each one against a proven structure.

The 2026 web design trends worth your attention

Most trend lists are a shopping cart of effects. The ones that matter in 2026 share a single thread — craft as the thing that's left when anyone can generate a decent-looking page.

Why your homepage hero is doing too much

Most heroes try to say everything at once and end up saying nothing. Here's how to give the top of your page a single, clear job — and let the rest of the page do the work.

When the interface stops being the differentiator

Good-looking UI is now cheap and increasingly automated. That's not a threat to design — it's a clarification of where the value was all along.

Where AI actually earns its place in a design workflow

The useful question isn't whether AI belongs in design. It's which parts of the process it genuinely improves — and which it quietly makes worse.

Claude Design and the end of rationed exploration

Anthropic's new design tool is being framed as a Figma killer. The more interesting story is what happens when exploring ten directions costs the same as exploring one.

Ten UX fundamentals that still win in 2026

Trends date fast. The principles below have survived every redesign, platform, and hype cycle — because they're about people, not pixels.

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