In short
- With Webflow, most of the hours in a project went into building it, and the strategy and the words got what was left.
- AI now does the heavy technical part, like a tractor on a field, and those hours come back to the conversation.
- When everything is possible, the real work is deciding what should be built, and that comes from taste, experience and knowing this world.
When the hours went into the ground
A few years ago, a website like the ones I make today would have been a project of around 1,000€, and it would have taken me about three months.
I drew every page in Figma, a design program, and then built the whole site by hand in Webflow, a website builder a bit like Wix or Squarespace, with much more freedom and much more work. The design alone was a big piece of work. Then came everything the site had to do: the booking forms, the payments, the emails that go out on their own, and the links between all of it.
And after all of that, the boring parts were still waiting. Making sure Google could find the site, making it load fast, shrinking every photo, writing the little preview that shows when someone shares a page, and checking every page on a phone and on a tablet, on Android and on iPhone, on Windows and on Mac. After weeks of building, the finishing took weeks of its own.
Divide 1,000€ by three months and it comes to about 333€ a month, for a huge amount of work.
Where the hours went
The real cost was in the parts that matter as much as the build, or more: the brand strategy and the writing. They got whatever time was left, and there was never much left.
With Webflow
Now, with AI
The tractor
With Webflow, it was like working a field with my bare hands. Now, with AI, I have a tractor.
Think of a farmer before tractors. One person, one field, everything by hand, and weeks and weeks to work the land. Then the tractor arrived, and the same person, on the same field, did in two days what used to take a month.
Bigger fields used to need a whole family, ten or twenty people working for a month. Agencies were the same, ten or twenty people on one website. Today one person who knows the craft can do that work in a fraction of the time.
The farmer still knows how to work the land. The tractor gives him the days back.
And with those days, the farmer did what farmers always did with free time: had new ideas, and talked with the neighbours about how to look after the land. That is what AI did for me. The time that went into levelling the ground now goes into talking with you, about the small details, about what makes you different, what you offer and what problem you solve, and into making it better, faster.
Listening without the second voice
Before, when a client was telling me about their work, there was a second voice in my head. Oh, that will be hard to build. How would I even do that? Sometimes what they described was completely abstract, and part of me was already worrying about the code.
That voice is gone. I listen with my full attention, and I can stay with someone for longer, in deeper sessions, before any design exists. Almost anything they describe can be made.
Everything is possible. Should it be?
Which brings a new question. I can build it, but should I?
That is where my experience comes in, and my taste, and ten years of writing code, the last four from inside this world. I know what a retreat page needs, what helps someone book a session, and what will only get in the way.
AI cannot make that call for you. ChatGPT, if we are honest, can feel like talking to someone with amnesia who agrees with whatever you ask. Claude, another AI, is far more faithful to what you actually said, and Perplexity, one made for searching, is good for research, but most of the people I work with only know ChatGPT, and that is fine. They live in a different world from the digital one.
Some are starting to use Claude, and I love that, because it changes the bridge between what I do and what I need to explain. Either way, the tools are only half of it. Knowing which of the possible things is right for you is the other half.
What that gives you
Because the building is faster, I can show you more, sooner, and every version comes from what we talked about. Feedback goes back and forth quicker, the presentations are made around your words, and nothing is left half done at the end.
I feel lighter in the work, more present, and the people I work with feel it too. I trust that I can give you something unique, and finished properly.
If you have a site in your head, tell me about it.
Bring the abstract version. Working out how to build it is my part.
