We build websites for small businesses and nonprofits, and this year changed how we handle website revisions. One project was for a volunteer-run nonprofit whose website had been rebuilt a couple of times over the years before it got to us.
Part of Big Site, Small Budget, a series about how small businesses can get the kind of website that used to take an enterprise budget.
On the morning of April 28 we were working on their landing page as it looks on a phone. Each time we made a change we took a screenshot to check it. We kept the screenshots, so we know exactly how that morning went.
One page, one morning
- 8:15:
landing-mobile-1 - 8:17:
landing-mobile-2 - 8:20:
landing-mobile-3 - 8:21:
landing-mobile-final - 8:24:
landing-mobile-tight - 8:26:
landing-mobile-tight2 - 8:40:
landing-mobile-v2 - 8:41:
landing-mobile-v2b - 8:46:
landing-mobile-v3 - 8:49:
landing-mobile-v4
That’s eleven looks at one page in 34 minutes, if you count the desktop version we checked at 8:22. We named one of them “final” and then made six more.
Why we didn’t stop at final
“Final” was fine. It was the version we’d have sent to a client for approval in the old way of doing things, and it probably would have been approved.
But looking at it on a phone, the spacing felt loose. So we tightened it. Then we tightened it again. Then we tried a different arrangement, which was “v2,” and a small change to that, which was “v2b.” By v4 it was right, and we moved on to the next page.
In the way most web projects run, each of those tweaks is a round of revisions. Someone writes up the change. A designer makes it. A developer builds it. Somebody emails a link, and a few days later someone else replies with “can the spacing be a bit tighter.” A small change can take a week and show up on an invoice. So everybody learns to live with “final.” Nobody asks for v4 because v4 costs too much.
That morning, each change took a couple of minutes. We described what we wanted to an AI assistant, it made the change on a private copy of the site, and we looked at the result. If we didn’t like it, we did it again. When we did like it, the change went to the live site.
By 10:12 that same morning we had also reworked three more of their pages.
It wasn’t a one-off
A few weeks later we did their “start here” page. There are four screenshots in six minutes, and the last one is of the live site.
On a different project, a dispensary’s homepage, one section went through 27 versions before we were happy with it. We’re not proud of the number exactly. It cost the client nothing, so there was no reason to settle.
What cheap website revisions mean if you’re hiring someone
When changes are cheap, a few things shift.
You get to see the thing instead of imagining it. Instead of arguing over a description of a layout, we can make three versions and look at them.
You stop saving up changes. A lot of clients hold back small requests because they don’t want to use up a revision round. There’s no round to use up.
Mistakes aren’t scary. We work on a copy of the site and back it up before each change, on top of the revisions WordPress keeps, which takes a couple of seconds. If something goes wrong, we go back.
Somebody still has to know when it’s right. The AI will happily make v5, v6, and v7 all day. It doesn’t know that v4 is the one. That part is still our job, and it’s the part you’re paying us for.