Can you build a functioning website in one prompt?

Mike G Robinson

AI Systems & Process Architecture · Founder @ MGRNZ & Maximised AI

August 4, 2026 · Thinking

There is nothing simple about deploying a simple but effective website.

At the start of 2025, full stack web development platforms such as loveable.dev and bolt.new, created the now common myth that AI can produce a functioning website with a very simple prompt.

My term for this is the #1-shot-app and most LLMs these days offer something similar with a call to action like “tell us your idea and we’ll build it”.

When a friend recently asked for some help with his business I figured, what better way to write up some home truths about web development in the AI age at the same time, debunking the 1-shot-app myth than with a real case study.

Why your business should have a website

Every website should start from an identified business opportunity.

An effective website is a sales and marketing tool for your business, designed to exploit an opportunity.

How does a website exploit opportunity?

The traditional purpose of a website is more aligned with an online presence or marketing. In a world now online 24/7, the purpose of most websites is to collect data – lead data, customer data, market and buying signals, traffic analysis etc.

A website is a ‘sales funnel’ or ‘lead magnet’. A central address to obtain information about, and interact with the business.

Opportunities to be exploited.

Many smaller businesses create a website for no other reason than to say they have one. Theres no doubt that it’s easier to build a site these days, but it is not easy to do well if you haven’t done it before.

The key takeaway is that a website is a business asset. Before you build one, make sure you’re committed to maintaining your asset through it’s useful life.

Why some businesses should NOT have a website

A website created as an afterthought, or to tick the boxes, is likely to end up being nothing more than a publicly available resource that demonstrates you have the discipline to maintain a simple website.

You dont have to go far to find examples of such websites created as an afterthought, their fate inevitably one of the following technical errors:

1. Home page has fallen back to a stale URL re-direct (404 Not Found)

2. Domain expired (502 Bad Gateway / 503 Service Unavailable)

3. Database failure (500 Internal Server Error)

4. Images, logos or other media on the site not rendering (this image cannot be displayed)

5. Hosting service unsubscribed or not recovered from downtime ((500 Internal Server Error)

The above are just some of the common problems of a poorly maintained website but preferable to your website being taken over, redirected or worse.

Bragging Rights – the currency for good ideas

Introducing Supercity Commercial Interiors Ltd.

Operating for almost 15 years now, Supercity is a small NZ business providing commercial property maintenance services in the Auckland area.

“Historically, most of my business has come as a sub-contractor so I’ve never had much of a need for a website or any social media”. Glenn Barrett, Owner

Speaking with Glenn Barrett, the owner and friend, a particular niche service for suspended ceiling tile maintenance had opened an opportunity to corner the market.

Seeing an opportunity for myself, I offered to build him a shiny new website, at no cost to him for build or hosting.

I don’t offer a website development service but web development is an important part of my own business so I’m more than capable. My incentives for development at no cost are opportunistic and include:

• “Bragging rights” – the ability to treat the work as a client testimonial
• The opportunity to build out a software component that’s in my roadmap. In this case, an automated quote request process
• Impress my mates 🙂

How do you build a Website?

There are a lot of bits and pieces that have to come together to get a website operating. You don’t need a lot of technical skills to do most of this stuff, but first you need to know that you have to do it.

I learnt most of this from my own experiments with software development utilising AI coding tools. I realised pretty quickly that there wasn’t a lot of software that I couldn’t build if I applied myself however, not a lot of that makes sense if you can’t get a website up.

The number one rule for any development work is respect the Systems Development Lifecycle, . Don’t let this over-complicate you. The SDLC is a process that should occur in a chronological order or sequence so applying these concepts to your website design and build makes sense. Like any business tool, it needs to be designed and implemented with some discipline.

I developed my own implementation methodology that takes these concepts and scales them to a simpler and less overwhelming approach.

If you want a copy of the The D.R.I.V.E Deployment Framework, type DRIVE in the comments and I’ll send one over.

This article is not aimed at being a step by step guide rather, a look at the components of your build. With this in mind, your first step is to have a validated good idea or concept and a plan to implement the necessary components, however that may look.

The Components of a simple, effective website

1. Domain Name

Once you have a plan, the first step is to of course get your domain name.

The name itself is your brand. I could write a full article just on how to find the best domain name for you business as there is some science to it. This is more than just a label, your domain is designed to be consumed by search engines such as Google but it doesn’t happen by default, rather by design.

For New Zealand businesses, buying a .com domain is cheaper but it is not natively tuned to New Zealand as it’s default location. When someone searches keywords associated with your domain, Google first goes to the location of the searcher. A localised domain such as .co.nz or .nz will return a localised domain result quicker than a .com.

For Supercity Interiors, domain name was particularly relevant:1. There is a limited liability company associated with the brand. We don’t want to stray too far from this.

2. There is competition for the term ‘Supercity’ with a local search. There are several other businesses in this search space competing for the top result.

3. One of these local search results is a liquidated company that shares the search term ‘Supercity Interiors’. This means there is a possibility of mistaken identity.

4. Cost: There are cost implications for your choice of domain. A .co.nz domain starts around $29 but you pay, $15 with an extra charge per month to redirect your site

2. DNS Records (Access to)

Most NZ domain registrars, unlike their counterparts offshore, charge additional fees for access to edit basic DNS records. This in part resulted in my preference for .com domains, the costs charged by NZ registrars tends to be a lot more than available with a .com.

DNS records control:

– where your site is published

– where your site is hosted

– where your email server is

– sub-domain names

You need access to these to set up your site, your emails and verify that you own the domain.

There are client secrets such as domain name, DNS, Hosting logins and more to come – how do share this with your client?

3. Site Hosting

Hosting should be considered from several angles.

How do you make and deploy changes to your site? If you own a .co.nz, you will have to pay a monthly transfer fee to have your domain records pointed to another hosting provider. I did discover that deploying to Cloudflare is supported at no cost from Supercity’s domain registrar saving a monthly fee.

It’s generally better to have a dedicated host. I prefer to have my hosting package where my domain name is registered – all in one place tends to be simpler.

Is cost a factor? You can host a simple website or landing page on GitHub pages for free. A Cloudflare Worker to deploy from your GitHub code repository is also free with a limit on traffic and using GitHub enhances your internal process risk if you choose to set it up properly.

Support is a factor you need to consider. Can you access support 24/7 to fix or diagnose problems? You will need this at some stage.

4. Email Hosting

Your choice of email hosting might not look significant but having an email management system that is flexible enough for your particular needs is important.

Recently I moved away from Google Workspace as my email and file management system in favour of Zoho Workplace. This was after considering a number of providers, my favour for Zoho was for a number of reasons:

• I can set up multiple domains as I wanted with only one user;
• I can have as many email aliases as I want, and point them all to one email address.
• I can select from any alias as sender for any email.

As with DNS and hosting, NZ registrars will charge extra if you want to set your mail servers to another provider. Cloudflare is an exception with some but the monthly cost of a NZ domain name increases a lot more than a .com when you start adding these things in.

5. Your Stack

What’s in your stack?

We haven’t built anything yet but now it’s time to think about it.

The Pros and Cons of WordPress

The safe approach if you’re new to this, is WordPress. Most web hosting platforms offer a quick wordpress setup and once you’re in to WordPress you should be able to work it out.

To be honest, while wordpress generally provides a user friendly interface to develop web pages, it’s still not easy. It takes time to get used to working with web pages, there are a lot of quirks to get used to.

Both my primary websites are built in wordpress however, when I build a simple site that I know will not require a lot of development in the future, I fall back to a more developer centric stack which has several advantages:

• A wordpress site splits program files and functions across several sources of truth – some resides in your code repo, some in wordpress admin settings, some in wordpress plugins.
• WordPress houses a lot of it’s website in the database layer meaning changes to the site often require database migration steps if working in a development environment.
• Because of the code spread in wordpress, AI coding assistants such as Codex often struggle to get an accurate understanding of the site as it renders.
• Working with a wordpress site locally or on a server, to develop and test changes, cannot be done natively – that is, you can’t just copy the code and get started, instead you’ll need a specific application such as Local by Flywheel.

The stack for Supercity is based on pure code for back and front end.

Unlike WordPress, the site is managed as code in GitHub, cloned locally and developed through branches before changes are merged into the main repository.

GitHub Actions trigger a site rebuild via a Cloudflare Worker whenever a Pull Request is merged into the main code repository on GitHub.

Supercity Stack

Front end is a mix of HTML, CSS and JS.

The back end is mainly TypeScript and JSON, with server-side services used where the site needs more than static pages.

6. Your Deployment Framework

The term ‘deployment’ refers more to the ongoing deployment of changes to your website once it has been setup.

Considering your development framework governs how you safely make changes to the site, deployment governs how these changes are actually made to your live website that people may be using.

GitHub.com

Introducing GitHub.com. Learning to use GitHub is possibly the most valuable skill I’ve added to my bow in recent years.

GitHub is a cloud-based platform for storing, sharing, and managing software code using version control. Git as it is known, packages code changes for review (Pull Requests – PR’s)

GitHub has all sorts of features to help protect your code from unintended changes including:- Configurable checks that automatically test code prior to merge

– Configurable authorisation pathways for PR’s (workflow)

– Issue artifacts can be raised with various templates

– Projects can be used to manage multiple changes

– GitHub actions can trigger a number of things upon PR events such as triggering a site rebuild

If you run a small business or you’re a solo-prenuer, GitHub helps protect you from…..yourself! That’s right, the biggest threat to my business is my own impatience which can see me try to shortcut good practice.

GitHub can enforce a level of mandatory checks and balances that go some way to mitigating the risk you, yourself pose to your own business

A Typical Deployment Event

For some context, let’s take a typical deployment event to show how these frameworks operate.

In the illustration below, a small site enhancement is identified and the build process is initiated with ChatGPT – a conversation about the enhancement.

The enhancement is built locally using prompts generated from ChatGPT and processed by Codex. A loop of follow up prompts are made depending on the output from Codex.

Further review, test and validation prompts may also be used.

Once built locally, a Node JS development server is ‘spun up’ to test the built enhancement which at this stage, is a parallel branch to the main code base.

Once tested, the branch is ‘committed’ as a structured code change to the local repository. This is done using the command line (Windows Powershell) which creates a ‘Pull Request’ to be reviewed in the cloud repository. This is an approval workflow which is essentially asking:

“Are you happy to merge these code changes (branches) into your master production code?” When approved (‘merged’), the code is merged but auditable as well as reversible.

In Supercity’s case, a merged Pull Request triggers a GitHub Action to rebuild the site pages. The Supercity git repository is connected to a Cloudflare Worker which rebuilds the site and promotes the changed pages to the production host.

A Note On Forms

While not mandatory, working forms are a must for an effective website.

At minimum, a contact request form should be provided so site visitors have somewhere to request contact.

There are a few ways to build these but to customise them to your exact requirements is not always easy.

The Supercity site includes an extra form for quotation requests. This captures information about the requestor’s job requirements, area, lead time and service type, then passes it to a server-side function.

Instead, the server-side function packages the quote data into a pre-formatted email and sends it to the Supercity sales team, saving them the job of collating it.

Your Website is Live – Now What?

Your last update has been deployed, your forms are working properly and your emails are set up. Your site is live.

Now the real work starts.

A deployed website is for all intents and purposes, invisible, without Google.

To get found on the internet, any website must be known to Google Search and Google Maps, something that doesn’t happen without a “Google Business Profile”.

It’s all about Google

Google has a suite of products that revolve around Google Search and Google Maps.

The Google Business Profile makes your domain name known to both Google Search and Maps. A Google Business profile:

– Verifies your GPS location (it now knows you)

– Associates your services with the location (it now knows there are services at the location)

– Indexes your site pages (in conjunction with your sitemap)

Once Google has sucessfully indexed all of your site pages, your site is now officially known by Google Search.

However, this has to be maintained. Google search is a ranking system that builds on trust signals over time. You have to go about your business and let Google see genuine customer interactions over time to increase search rankings.

From here you have to set up Google tags to track events in Google Analytics.

Then there’s Google Ads, Google Trends…………… and so on!

Bottom line: can you build a website with one prompt?

While it’s a stretch to think you can produce a functioning website with one prompt, it’s not impossible. However, it’s only made possible when the prompt has the luxury of sitting on top of a lot of existing infrastructure, default build environments and pre-formatted build routines.

bolt.new and loveable.dev, are both platforms that promote the ability to 1-shot-prompt a website and because of their infrastructure, they make it more feasible.

But if you want to build a robust website, there’s a lot more to it.

The best place to start is the beginning – grab a domain name and start imagining.