I Rebuilt My Website in an Afternoon: On Building With Intention in the Age of AI.
A weekend ruiner. But wow.
I rebuilt my entire website in an afternoon. Something this dynamic would normally take weeks — easily. This time it took a few prompts and some tweaking.
Let me be clear, for the non-techy people among us (of which I am firmly one).
How it actually worked
The process was genuinely accessible, which is the whole point of why it is worth writing about.
First, I had an AI design tool build both pages from scratch, which I could visually edit as it went — watching the design take shape and adjusting it in real time. Then I copied the underlying code it produced and moved it into an AI coding tool. Finally, I connected that to two backend platforms, which included linking my domain — essentially connecting the code to the internet. To be completely clear: I did not have to write any code myself.
Now, any time I want to make a change, I simply type what I want into the coding tool, and it appears on my website. That is it. This is, to put it mildly, wild.
I had wanted to refresh my personal and consulting landing pages for ages. I threw some things together when I first started consulting, but they never really felt like me, and I had wanted to pull everything under the Making It Matter banner for a while. I just never had the time. Now it is done.
Done is better than perfect
It is not perfect. There are bits I will keep tweaking. But if there is one thing I have learned recently — particularly during my time at Network School — it is that you do not need perfection to launch. You need something real enough to put out into the world so that you can actually learn from it.
That lesson applies to far more than websites. So many good ideas never see daylight because their creators are waiting for a level of polish that the market does not actually require and often does not reward. Real feedback comes from real things released into the real world, not from endless private refinement.
The why behind this — and why it matters now
But I want to share something beyond the “look what I built” of it, because it connects directly to why I do the consulting and Making It Matter work I do.
Here is my why: in a world where anyone can — or very soon will be able to — build almost anything, I think we have a real opportunity to build things that genuinely make a difference to outcomes for human beings.
And I think the gap between the products that win and the ones that quietly lose customers is going to come down to one thing: how they make the people using them feel. Whether through experience, design, or service. When the ability to build is universal, the differentiator is no longer whether you can build it. It is whether you understood the person you built it for.
Which leads to the point I most want to land: speed and AI integration, without intention and genuine, meaningful consideration of the customer, is just more noise. The tools are extraordinary. But the tools are not the point. The point is what you choose to build with them, for whom, and how much you actually cared about their experience.
The fact that I could rebuild my website in an afternoon is remarkable. But it would be worth very little if the website did not genuinely reflect who I am and serve the people I am trying to reach. The technology gave me speed. The intention is what made the speed worth having.
For the non-techy people like me: there is a real opportunity here to create, build, and do incredible things. Just have a play. And then bring some genuine intention to what you make.
What is a product, service, or experience that has made you feel something lately — in a good way? I love collecting examples of people getting this right.