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Rebuilding our own website as an AI-native studio
We rebuilt jezweb.com.au in May 2026, after fifteen years on various WordPress incarnations.
Why agencies struggle to rebrand themselves
Web agencies build websites for other businesses constantly. Their own sites are always last in the queue. When their offer expands, the site lags. Their site says they do what they did three years ago, not what they do now.
We were guilty of this. The old jezweb.com.au focused 80% on WordPress and 20% on everything else, even though we were doing 50/50 by mid-2025.
The fix is uncomfortable: rebuild the site, even though there’s always paying client work. The old site was costing us prospects who saw “WordPress agency” and didn’t realise we could build their AI app.
What we changed in the rebuild
Headline narrative
Old: “WordPress website design Newcastle.” New: “We build websites in days, apps in weeks, and the AI tools that run inside them.” The new headline says the breadth of what we do without diminishing any one thing.
Surface the AI work
Six AI products with their own pages. 70+ MCP servers in a catalogue. Custom AI app builds with real client examples. None of this was visible on the old site, even though we’d been working on AI since GPT-3 in late 2022.
Keep WordPress proudly
We didn’t pivot AWAY from WordPress. That would have been a mistake. We have 1,500+ WordPress sites and our own JezPress platform underneath them. The new site features WordPress and AI as parallel offerings, not competitors.
Real client work
Old site had a portfolio gallery with 470+ entries. New site keeps all of them but elevates 13-15 standout projects with proper detail. The long tail still exists for SEO; the curated set tells the story.
What the rebuild taught us
Honest copy beats clever copy. “Twenty years of websites. Three years of AI. HQ in Newcastle, global reach.” This is the kind of line we’d kill on a client’s site for being too plain. On our site, the plainness is the point.
Don’t hide what you don’t do. Our /apps page has a “when to walk” section listing the project types we won’t take. Counterintuitive, but builds trust enormously.
Specifics outsell adjectives. “1,500 WordPress sites hosted” beats “extensive WordPress experience.” “80 MCP servers in our catalogue” beats “comprehensive AI integrations.”
Migrating 920 URLs is harder than it looks. The new site has 14 top-level pages, ~471 portfolio pages, 18 industry pages, 19 SEO answer pages, ~12 blog posts. Most of those needed redirect mapping from old URLs. The full SEO migration plan is documented in our audit folder: this is a multi-week project, not a weekend.
What’s next
Domain migration is the last step: pointing jezweb.com.au at this build with proper redirects in place. We’ll stage it on a subdomain first, monitor for 1-2 weeks, then DNS swap.
After that: ongoing iteration. The first version of the new site shipped after about six weeks of focused work. The 100th iteration is still ahead.
If you’re in a similar position (agency or service business whose website is telling the wrong story), talk to us. We’re happy to share what worked and what we’d do differently.