For most of my career, building a website meant hours in the weeds: hand-tuning code, chasing layout bugs, wrestling a CMS into shape. I've drawn, designed, written, edited video, and built sites in WordPress, Joomla, and plain PHP. I loved the craft, but a lot of the time went into the plumbing.
That's changed. These days, building a site feels a lot more like art directing than coding.
What the work looks like now
I work with an AI assistant that does the heavy lifting on the build. It writes clean, plain HTML styled with Tailwind — no bloated page builder, no plugin pile to keep patched. I tell it what the site needs to say and how it should feel, it builds a pass, and I react: tighten this, the type is too timid, this photo is fighting the headline, the call to action is buried.
That loop is the job now. The AI is fast. What it doesn't have is taste, judgment, or the years of knowing what a client actually needs versus what they asked for on the first call. That part is still mine, and honestly, it's the part I was always best at.
The setup behind it
Nothing exotic, and that's on purpose:
- The site code lives in GitHub, so every change is tracked and can be rolled back.
- Cloudflare hosts it — fast, secure, and inexpensive.
- A copy also stays on my own drive, so the client's site never depends on any single service.
Plain files, simple hosting, nothing to break when a plugin updates at 2 a.m.
Updates by email
Here's the part clients like most. When they need a change, they just email it to a dedicated changes address. That inbox gets checked twice every weekday.
- I get a heads-up on every request, so nothing slips by me.
- Small text fixes — a new phone number, updated hours, a typo — publish automatically.
- Bigger changes wait for my OK before anything goes live.
- Clients never get an automated reply. If they hear back, they hear from me.
For a small business owner, that's about as easy as it gets. No logins, no dashboards, no training. Just "hey, can you change this," and it's handled.
For clients who want to edit themselves
Some people like having the keys. For them there's a free option called Decap CMS: they log in, edit their text and photos, see a preview, and publish — with the layout locked so nothing gets accidentally wrecked. If someone wants to click right on the page and edit in place, CloudCannon does that for about $50 a month. I'm also tinkering with building my own simple on-page editor.
That said, I suspect a lot of clients will keep doing what they already do: send an email.
What this means for my clients
I recently used this whole process on a site for Nomad Pet Dental, Dr. Cooper Wahl's veterinary dental practice. What used to be weeks of build time became a few focused sessions of direction and refinement — and Dr. Wahl can get updates made without learning a thing.
AI didn't replace the designer. It moved me up the ladder. I spend my time on the decisions that matter — what the site should say, how it should feel, and whether it's doing its job — and less on the plumbing.
If you're a small business, nonprofit, or museum and your site feels stuck, I'd love to help. Say hello at [email protected].
— Steve Luiting, Steve Knows Web