Introduction

For 3 years, our company website felt like a museum.

Every department wanted their own wing.
Every service got its own page.
And the codebase was a monster template we bought “to save time.”

Spoiler: it didn’t save time. It wasted everyone’s.

Last month, I hit reset.

I rebuilt it solo, stripped it down, and launched a minimal version that actually feels professional.

Here’s what I learned — and exactly what I’m telling the business and tech teams.

Lesson 1: Less Is More

The biggest shift wasn’t technical.
It was philosophical.

We used to chase every vertical we could serve.
The new site focuses on just three core areas where we have genuine, provable expertise.

• Instead of 50 shallow pages, we now have ~10 deep ones
• Every section has real proof:
  • Case studies
  • Results
  • Client logos
  • Specific outcomes

Not generic promises.

I told the team bluntly:

“Trying to be everything to everyone makes us nothing to anyone.”

Narrowing the focus doesn’t feel safe at first — but it instantly makes us look more authoritative.

Now:

• The right prospects stay longer
• The wrong ones leave quickly

That’s a feature, not a bug.

Lesson 2: The Hidden Cost of “Saving Time” with Templates

The old site started as a premium template we bought to “launch fast.”

It seemed smart at the time.

Reality:

• Massive codebase (tens of thousands of lines)
• Only ~30% of features actually used
• When sales, marketing, and leadership are all stakeholders:
  • Feedback rounds never end
  • Devs become bottlenecks for simple copy changes

We weren’t saving time.
We were stacking spaghetti code on top of spaghetti code.

This time, I started with a blank canvas.

How I Built the New Site

I knew I didn’t want to spend months hand-coding everything from zero
(I’d be an idiot if I did that in 2025)

So I leaned heavily on AI — but strategically.

1. Ideation & Inspiration

I studied ~20 websites I admired (competitors and non-competitors).

• Saved screenshots
• Noted layout and interaction patterns
• Wrote down the exact feeling I wanted visitors to have

2. Structure & Content First

Before touching code, I outlined every page on paper.

Anything that didn’t serve the main goal was cut:

Establish trust and get qualified leads to contact us

No fluff. No filler.

3. AI as a Force Multiplier

• Gemini was surprisingly good at generating clean, modern HTML/CSS structures
• It wasn’t enough visually, so I leaned on Lovable for stronger visual cues
• Revisited Grok and ChatGPT multiple times:
  • Sometimes brilliant
  • Sometimes completely mangled animations

Eventually, I settled on a workflow:

Use AI to generate a solid base layout, then refine piece by piece.

4. Fine-Tuning with Prompt Engineering

• Dug into prompt libraries
• Refined prompts over dozens of iterations
• Reached a near-perfect v1 structure
• Cloned everything to GitHub
• Used Gemini’s CLI to tweak smaller components in isolation
  (especially animations)

Result

The site is:

• Clean
• Minimal
• Fast

And most importantly — it doesn’t look like it was thrown together by a college student
(even though… technically… the last one kind of was — by me and a couple others)

It’s not perfect yet.

• Routes need cleanup
• Some sections need more personality
• A few interactions can be smoother

But v1 is live, and it’s already outperforming the old monster:

• Design
• Aesthetics
• Code quality

The Takeaway

• Stop treating the website like a brochure that lists everything we’ve ever done
• Expertise is demonstrated through focus, not volume
• Simple, minimal design signals confidence
  (complexity often hides insecurity)
• If every department gets veto power, the result will always be bloated compromise

The new site is proof that sometimes the best way forward is to:

Ignore the committee
Ship something opinionated (which I was always afraid to do)
Iterate based on real feedback
Instead of building in the air — and ending up with a mess