Anyone can spin up a website with AI now. But for experts who built their careers offline, the hard part was never the tool. It’s knowing what to publish, where, and why.
In this episode, we talk with Eleanor Mayrhofer, a digital strategist and web designer who helps people and organizations that regularly publish ideas consolidate, streamline, and showcase their work online. Eleanor came up through design school and the Web 1.0 boom, spent more than a decade in UX and global methodology work at Publicis Sapient in Munich, and now works with executives, academics, novelists, and think tanks who are great at what they do and have no interest in learning Claude Code.
We get into why the website is usually just the presenting symptom, how Eleanor matches a distribution plan to someone’s temperament, and why she still builds on Squarespace while getting excited about Claude Design for mockups. We also talk about AI copy flattening niche expertise, what book design teaches you about websites, and the two domains everyone should buy today.
* Why “I need a website” is often the presenting symptom of a bigger digital strategy problem
* Matching the platform to the person: a blog for the contemplative exec, philosophy talk radio for the professor, a Substack for one specific think tank project
* Eleanor’s six-ingredient recipe: goal, positioning, brand, platform, content, and distribution network
* “Posting my head off on LinkedIn and nothing’s happening,” and what to build instead
* Squarespace, WordPress, and vibe-coded sites: which ones your clients can actually maintain
* How AI copy struggles with niche jargon, contested terms, and human stories
* AI raising the floor on design while squashing the ceiling, and what book design teaches about structure and hierarchy
* Buy your name. Buy your book title. (Or Meg will, just to mess with you.)
“If you have this think tank, you need to build it out as a website. It’s like you need to showcase what you can do, and then you need to find bigger publications and point them to that body of work, and then write for those publications. “I’m posting my head off on LinkedIn, and nothing’s happening.” It’s like, well, nothing is gonna keep happening. You need to just have this infrastructure to show to the right people and be able to point to those.” - Eleanor
About our Guest
Eleanor Mayrhofer
Connect with Us
Listen on Spotify
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Meg Casebolt
Jessica Lackey
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