The hard part of a website was never the building

My first website launch was on New Year’s Eve, surrounded by developers. No AI involved, just lots of chai and lots of debate.

On 31 December 2018 we were all preparing to welcome 2019. I sat with our developers and designers going through each line of our homepage. What colour should we use? What layout? Where should the “contact us” button go? Every page meant another meeting. Every little change made us wait.

We launched that night, and Hospital Success finally had a website.

Since then we have redesigned the site countless times, each time taking weeks, sometimes months. This year, with a small team and some AI tools, we launched again. It became an easier process.

It was the thinking

It wasn’t the coding or designing that was challenging. It was the thinking.

• Who are we speaking to?
• What should they feel in the first 5 seconds on our homepage?
• What are our competitors saying, and what are they failing to say?
• What do we want visitors to do?

With AI tools we could create the pages in days. Getting the answers to those questions took us weeks. We researched our audience, analysed competitors, wrote our project report, tore it up and changed it. Only once we had answers did we start to build.

The real change in 2026 is knowing what to say and who to say it to. Not the actual building of the website.