There’s an old saying that the cobbler’s children go barefoot. The cobbler spends every day making shoes for other people, and by the end of the day there’s no time, energy or leather left for the family at home.

Every agency knows the feeling. Client work comes first, because it should. Deadlines move, launches happen, support tickets arrive. Our own website sits at the bottom of the list, quietly getting older, while we build better ones for everybody else.

Our barefoot years

For a long time, plan9.co.uk was a good example of the saying. It worked, but it didn’t show what we do, saying little about the thinking and process behind our work, and nothing about how AI has revolutionised our industry.

We knew what the new site should be. We had the case studies, the opinions and the skills. What we didn’t have was a few clear weeks to plan, design, build, populate and test a full Umbraco site for ourselves without taking that time from a client.

So we built it differently

This site was designed and built in conversation with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. We described what we wanted, reviewed what came back and refined it, page by page. The layouts, case studies, articles, dark mode, share images and the small animated logo in the header all came out of that process.

It’s a prototype in the truest sense: fast, flexible and built to be changed. It runs as lightweight HTML pages hosted in our .NET setup, with a contact form handled on the server.

This article is about why. For a step-by-step guide to how we did it, read How we built an SEO-ready .NET website without writing a line of code.

What we gave up

There are trade-offs, and we’d rather be upfront about them, because they’re the same trade-offs we discuss with clients.

Why that’s fine, for now

Our website has a small number of pages, changes a few times a month, and is maintained by the people who built it. For a site like that, a full CMS is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. For most of our clients, the opposite is true. They need editors, workflows, multilingual content and integrations, and that’s exactly where Umbraco earns its place.

Choosing the right tool for the job is the advice we give everyone else. This time we took it ourselves.

What we learned

Building our own site this way showed us, first hand, what AI-assisted development is good at. It’s quick at turning a clear idea into a working page. It’s good at the repetitive work: building twenty pages from one template, generating share images, writing structured data for search engines. It still needs people who know what good looks like, to review every change and make the decisions that matter.

That’s the same way we use AI on client projects. It takes the routine work, so our developers can spend their time on the parts that need experience.

So yes, the cobbler’s children were barefoot for a while. Now they’re wearing a fresh pair of Adidas Sambas. Not handmade leather boots, but they fit, they look good and they got us out of the door.