Building a website with AI: what should you consider?

AI creates new possibilities

The appeal is easy to understand. You describe what you need, AI helps with the design and technology, and a short time later you have a working first version online.

For a prototype, internal tool or temporary campaign, this may be exactly the right approach. You can test an idea before turning it into a larger project. You learn what works while keeping the initial investment limited.

The question is therefore not whether you can build something yourself. Increasingly, you can.

A more useful question is whether building it yourself fits the importance and expected lifespan of what you are creating.

What does it ask of your team?

When someone on your team builds a website, there is no external invoice. This can make the solution feel almost free.

The internal hours still exist.

A colleague might spend two days learning a tool, writing prompts, adjusting pages and solving unexpected problems. That can be a valuable investment. At the same time, that colleague is not working with customers, improving services, communicating, selling or doing the other work for which you would normally rely on them.

The role often becomes broader as well. Someone who understands your organisation and content may suddenly need to make decisions about navigation, mobile use, accessibility, forms, hosting, analytics and privacy.

This does not mean your team cannot do it. It means people are learning a new field while building and taking responsibility for work that does not normally belong to their role.

Before starting, it helps to ask:

• How much internal time do we expect this to take?

• Which regular work will receive less attention?

• Who will review the result?

• Who will maintain the website after launch?

• Will that person still have time for it three months from now?

Building it yourself can be more affordable. Internal time is not free, even when it does not appear as a separate line in the budget.

Compare AI today with AI today

Stories about vibe coding often compare what someone can build with AI today with what an agency would have delivered several years ago.

That does not provide the full picture.

Web professionals now use the same AI tools. The main difference is the experience with which those tools are directed and evaluated. Someone who builds websites every day is more likely to recognise a solution that may create problems later, a design that will not scale or an important requirement that has been missed.

A fair comparison is not an internal team using AI versus an agency without AI.

Compare what your organisation can build with AI today with what an experienced professional can deliver using AI today. Include total time, quality, risk, maintenance and responsibility in that comparison.

Building it yourself may still be the better option. The difference is that you are making that decision based on today's reality.

When is live truly live?

Publishing a website has become remarkably easy. Once there is a URL and the homepage opens, the work can feel complete.

For an experiment, that may be enough. For your main communication channel, it is worth asking a few additional questions:

• Has someone other than the person who built it tested the website?

• Is there a separate environment where changes can be checked safely?

• Do forms also behave correctly when something goes wrong?

• Does the site work across different phones, screen sizes and browsers?

• Have accessibility, search visibility, analytics and privacy been considered?

• Can a change be reversed if it causes a problem?

Staging and acceptance do not need to make a project unnecessarily heavy. They provide a safe opportunity to find issues before customers or other visitors encounter them.

The more important the website is to your reputation, services or revenue, the more valuable that review becomes.

Build it yourself, collaborate or outsource?

The choice is not always between doing everything yourself and outsourcing everything. There are roughly three possible routes.

You can build it yourself when the project is small, temporary or internal, and when the consequences of an error are limited.

You can also create the prototype internally and invite a specialist to review the structure, technology and publication process. This keeps the speed of experimentation while adding professional oversight before the website takes on a larger role.

For a central business website or application, you may prefer to place design, development and maintenance with an experienced partner from the start. AI can make this route faster and more efficient as well.

A combination is often just as valuable as choosing one of the two extremes.

Making the best use of people and technology

AI gives business owners more choice. It makes experimentation more affordable and helps turn ideas into something concrete more quickly.

The most important consideration is not who can publish something fastest. It is where your team creates the most value, what level of quality you need and who can take responsibility once the website is live.

At Parego, we use AI to research, design and build more efficiently. We also consider what an organisation genuinely needs. Sometimes you can continue perfectly well on your own. Sometimes collaboration is the smarter choice. In other cases, you may want one partner to oversee the entire process.

Not sure which route fits your plans? We are happy to think it through with you, even when the conclusion is that you can handle part of it yourself.