How AI is changing B2B website design and development

By Marko Batarilo, Senior Development Lead, Aspectus Group

Explore how AI is changing B2B website design and development, from AI website builders and WordPress to SEO, content and your new website strategy. 

AI can now produce a working website surprisingly quickly. Give the latest tools a brief, some content and a visual direction and they can generate layouts, responsive interfaces and working code. That’s genuinely useful for certain projects. 

An early prototype or a straightforward landing page may not need a complex technology stack or lengthy development process. If it has a limited lifespan, few integrations and rarely needs updating, an AI-generated website could be a perfectly sensible approach. 

Most B2B websites have a more demanding job. They need to support marketing activity over several years, serve different audiences, publish and organize growing amounts of content, integrate with other systems and contribute to lead generation. The question becomes less about how quickly a website can be created and more about how well it supports the business and its marketing goals. 

AI has a useful role in that process, including development support, troubleshooting and testing. Experience helps us decide where to use it and how the website should meet the business’s needs over time. 

Building a B2B website starts with the business 

Before we design or develop a website, we need to understand the business behind it. 

• Who are its audiences? 
• What are they trying to achieve? 
• How should the business be positioned? 
• Which audience journeys matter most? 
• What information do people need at each stage? 
• What should ultimately encourage them to take action? 

These questions belong in a B2B website brief, helping to establish the objectives and requirements before design and development begin. 

For B2B organizations, those answers aren’t always straightforward. Buying journeys can involve several audiences, long lead times and multiple interactions with a brand. A prospective client, investor, journalist and potential employee could all arrive on the same website looking for very different things. Each journey must be tailored to its audience’s needs. 

These requirements shape the information architecture, content, UX and design before development begins. 

This is where the breadth of an integrated agency team becomes valuable. At Aspectus, strategists, brand and content specialists, SEO experts, designers and developers can all work together on the same project. Messaging informs the information architecture, search insight helps shape content, UX and design determine how people navigate it, and development turns those requirements into a platform that can support the business over time. 

A website needs to work for the marketing team 

A website may launch once, but marketing teams need to use it every week. 

They publish insights and company news, create campaign landing pages, add events, update services, change team members and respond to new search opportunities. The website needs to evolve with the business. 

For most B2B marketing teams, routine changes shouldn’t require someone to edit code or manage a deployment process. 

This is one reason we continue to build many websites using established content management systems such as WordPress. A well-designed CMS allows the people responsible for the website to manage it themselves, while maintaining branding consistency across the site. 

Rather than creating a collection of fixed pages, we can build reusable templates and structured content that allow teams to create new pages and campaigns without starting again each time. Publishing workflows, permissions and revision histories can also help with version control when several people or teams contribute to a website. 

That operational side of web development is easy to overlook when simply comparing the speed of the initial build.  

Web content needs structure 

A B2B website is also more than a collection of individual pages. 

It may contain insights, people, services, sectors, locations, events, case studies and other types of content that are closely related to each other. Treating these as related, structured content makes them easier to manage, reuse and present in different ways across the website, so they work together to support business goals. 

This structure also makes later changes easier. A redesign shouldn’t require a business to scrap years of useful content simply because its presentation has changed. 

Structured content is becoming particularly relevant as search evolves. Traditional SEO remains important, while AI-powered search and answer engines are creating additional ways for audiences to discover and research businesses. Clear information architecture and well-structured, authoritative content make it easier for machines as well as people to understand what an organization does and where its expertise lies. 

An ‘ecosystem approach’ to websites 

Modern B2B websites are connected to a wider marketing and technology ecosystem. Forms may feed into a CRM or marketing automation platform. Recruitment content may come from an applicant tracking system. Events, analytics, consent management, personalization and other services may all need to interact with the website. 

Those integrations need to work reliably and remain easy to maintain when the systems around them change. This requires a joined-up approach that considers all website components as part of a greater whole. 

There are also responsibilities that come with operating a business website. Accessibility, privacy, security, performance and consent aren’t particularly exciting parts of a redesign, but they can have significant commercial, reputational and legal implications. 

A professional website project needs clear ownership of those requirements, including testing before launch and managing them afterwards. AI can support testing and troubleshooting, with the project team responsible for reviewing the results. 

Choosing the right technology 

None of this means every B2B website should be built in WordPress. 

We use WordPress extensively because it provides a mature content management platform and gives marketing teams considerable control over their websites. We also work with headless architectures and other approaches where the requirements justify them. 

A global website managed by several marketing teams has different requirements from a standalone campaign site. A business with an internal engineering team may be comfortable with a development workflow that would become a bottleneck for an organization where the marketing team owns the website. 

 The same applies when choosing an approach to building websites, including AI-generated options. There are projects where simplicity and speed are an advantage. Yet there are many others where content management, integrations, governance and long-term flexibility carry much more weight. 

Understanding those requirements must come before choosing the technology. 

What happens after launch matters even more 

Most business websites will be around for several years. During that time, the organization will change, campaigns will come and go, and new technology will need to be integrated. Expectations around search, accessibility, privacy and performance will also evolve. 

A decision that saves time during the initial build can become expensive if routine changes later require specialist intervention or if the website becomes difficult for another developer or agency to maintain. 

There is also a significant difference between maintaining a website and improving it. Analytics can show where users are dropping out of important journeys. Search data can identify topics audiences are looking for. Campaign performance can expose pages that aren’t converting effectively. 

For us, ongoing improvement is an important part of website development. The objective is to give marketing teams a platform they can operate themselves while retaining the ability to measure, optimize and extend it as their requirements change. Insights gathered throughout the website’s life help guide those improvements. 

Where AI fits into our development process 

We use AI within our own website development workflows, including for development support, troubleshooting and testing. It can reduce some repetitive work and help developers explore solutions more efficiently. 

We review and take responsibility for what goes into the websites we build. Generated code has to be easy to maintain and meet the same standards for accessibility, security and performance as code written in any other way. 

The tools will continue to change, and we’ll continue to use them where they improve how we work. What matters most to clients is whether the finished website does what their business needs it to do. 

Building a B2B website for the long term 

AI has lowered the barrier to producing a website quickly, and that creates useful new options. The initial build is one part of the picture; much of a B2B website’s value comes from how well it supports the business over time. 

A new website strategy should look beyond the initial build. Consider who will manage it, how content will grow and work together, what it needs to integrate with, how people will find it, how success will be measured and what happens when the business changes. 

At Aspectus, our website projects bring together strategy, brand, content, SEO, UX, design and development to address those questions as a whole. This approach should give your marketing team a useful platform for launch day and sustained value throughout its lifetime. 

Planning a new B2B website? Talk to our digital team about building a website around your business, audiences and long-term marketing goals. 

About the author

Marko leads the web development team at Aspectus, overseeing the technical strategy, development and ongoing management of client websites. He brings extensive experience in full-stack development and content management systems, with a particular focus on website security, performance and delivering solutions that support clients’ wider business and marketing objectives.