January has kicked off the new year with fresh energy and plenty to celebrate at Fanatic. We’ve launched our first website of 2026 for Power Electrics, run accessibility workshops that are bringing the whole team together, and are upgraded our development foundations with some new tools. The Digital team has been busy sharing predictions for the year ahead, and we’ve been fuelling the creativity with coffee catch ups and brunch outings. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
We’re proud to announce our first website go-live of 2026! A brand new site for Power Electrics. After the great success our paid media team achieved with Power Electrics, they asked us to help build them a refreshed website for the new year.
This project gave us the opportunity to flex some new creative muscles. Thomas led the design work, which makes use of creative motion graphics that help elevate the brand’s eco-friendly initiatives while making the user experience more visually interesting and engaging. We used Rive for the homepage animations – the same system that powered Spotify Wrapped – bringing a real sense of movement and energy to the site.
The Development team has been hard at work enhancing the foundations we build our clients’ websites on.
We’ve been using our own custom boilerplate for years to ensure the sites we develop are set on deep-rooted, robust foundations. It acts as a lightweight platform allowing the Development team to build modern, completely bespoke websites that integrate well with other teams within Fanatic and our internal tooling.
Whilst we’ve been making small changes over time to enhance security and performance, this month the Dev team made some larger improvements to ensure it remains part of a modern stack. They’ve also incorporated feedback from other teams to further improve what we’re delivering to clients as a whole.
Improvements include upgrading to the latest version of Tailwind, using Vite as our build tool, updating deployment pipelines to ensure they run faster, and making improvements to ensure better foundations for SEO, GEO and accessibility.
Christina has been championing the idea of ‘Shifting Left’. By embedding accessibility into the entire process and this month she held her first Accessibility/Dev Workshop with the entire development team. Followed by a company stand up.
This marks the beginning of a planned series of workshops where we discuss how to be consistent in remediating recurring accessibility issues, which frameworks and platforms help or hinder accessibility, new technology considerations, and how we approach new website builds. The aim is to ensure we’re unified, informed and acting as a cohesive team in our approach to accessibility.
Dan’s been busy contributing to Dotdigital’s 2026 predictions, sharing his thoughts on where email marketing and digital engagement are heading in the year ahead. It’s always great to see our team’s expertise being recognised in the wider industry.
Mary has shared her thoughts on what this year holds for organic search, and it’s a great read for anyone working in digital.
“I believe 2026 will be the year AI adoption truly becomes universal,” Mary says. “Up until now, usage has tended to skew towards people in technical roles or those who are naturally curious about new technology. I reckon that divide will all but disappear this year. AI will become embedded in how people work, shop, research and go about their daily lives, regardless of profession or background.
Mary anticipates we’ll see users become more comfortable with agentic commerce through platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode. “There will be some initial hesitancy, which is completely understandable when you’re handing over purchasing decisions to an AI. But I reckon people will start small, perhaps asking for recommendations, and gradually build enough trust to make actual purchases through these conversational interfaces.”
As a result, Mary expects organic search traffic will continue to decline, but she doesn’t see this as doom and gloom. “The visitors who do come through will be more qualified and more likely to convert. The focus will shift from chasing volume to prioritising value.”
On the technical side, Mary reckons we’ll finally see LLMs start interacting with llms.txt files this year. The standard has been around for a little while now, but adoption from the AI providers themselves has been slow.
“Finally, I believe the teams that will thrive are those combining traditional marketing fundamentals with conversion rate optimisation, solid SEO practices, and the more advanced technical work needed for AI-driven search. That integrated, cross-disciplinary approach is what will set the winners apart.”
Mary adds an important note: “With all of this in mind, I really wish the large AI providers would pay more attention to the natural resources being consumed every time a response is generated. The water usage required to cool data centres is substantial, and I’d love to see these companies either implement alternative cooling systems or invest in finding ways to significantly reduce water consumption. It feels like a blind spot that needs addressing as AI scales further.”
In January, Althea had the opportunity to attend the Advanced Email Conference in Manchester, an event focused on customer-centric email marketing & CRM strategies that deliver real results.
The event brought together Email & CRM specialists across a whole range of industries, including brand representatives from Dominos Pizza, Plum finance and Cambridge University.
The day covered topics such as AI in the inbox, the importance of data quality for email targeting and considering what metrics REALLY matter when it comes to measuring campaign ROI. Althea was particularly interested in considerations of email personalisation, and balancing smart personalisation strategies that convert with the issue of over-personalisation increasing cognitive load.
Althea is already feeding those insights back into our strategies, helping us shape more considerate, effective email journeys for our clients.
January’s been a strong start to 2026. With new sites launched, workshops underway, and big ideas taking shape, we’re looking forward to what the rest of the year brings.