I rebuilt my father-in-law’s website over Christmas
(and saved him 90% of the cost).
My partner’s dad runs a kitchen extension business in Watford, the commuter town best known as the home of Warner Bros' Harry Potter Studios.
Over Christmas dinner, between roast potatoes and tea, I found out something mildly horrifying.
He’d been charged a one-off £100 design and development fee 10 years ago, plus an additional £100 every year. Just for the site to… exist.
No updates. No improvements. No control.
Ten years later, that’s £1,000 for hosting a static brochure site. Naturally, I did what any good daughter-in-law would do over the holidays. I rebuilt the whole thing.
Being a UX designer, I live and breathe Figma. Being a web developer… not so much. So my first question was simple. How hard could this actually be?
I tried the obvious shortcuts first. I tested different premium AI tools that promised you could “just type and ship,” including Readdy, Lovable, and Notion.
The ads made them look magical. In practice, they were expensive, restrictive, and weirdly clunky for such a simple brochure site. Limited control. Awkward layouts. Hard to tweak even the smallest things. Paywalls everywhere.
None of it made sense for a small local business.
Some lovely misadventures trying to get things going with Lovable.
So I did what designers do best. A lot of trial and error. A lot of late-night Googling. A lot of “there has to be a cheaper way.” Eventually, I designed the whole thing using free tools, exported it with plugins, hosted it for free, and only paid for the domain.
Total cost: £10 a year.
That’s about 90% cheaper than what he’d been paying, with a modern site he can actually update himself.
Apparently, that also makes it the best Christmas present I’ve ever given him.
Walkthrough of the new website.
Go have a look.
New site: spbwatford.com
The gloriously outdated original: spbuilding.co.uk
And if you happen to live near Watford and need a kitchen or loft extension, well… now you know a guy.
