Wednesday, March 25, 2026

PATRICK KEMP

Chasing the rabbit holes

I Built Six Websites Before Dinner

2 min read
I Built Six Websites Before Dinner

In 1999 I built my first website for my favorite band, Shane and Shane. It was built in Flash, which most of you probably don't even remember. That site set the stage for the next 25 years. I built hundreds of websites. Banks, churches, dog food companies, NYSE listed firms, small shops, big operations. Our company won design awards and it became one of our strongest selling points for landing new clients. At some point in the last few years I figured I'd aged out. Web design had become a younger person's game and I'd moved on.

Two weeks into my OpenClaw journey I saw a video making a big claim. Beautiful websites from one small prompt. I had to try it. A few hours later I had redesigned my brother's golf course design site, my son's filmmaker portfolio, and our construction business page. Every redesign came back better than the original. But what about something from scratch? I pointed it at a brand new project, BrazosConstruction.net, and for the first time our company had a real website. Two days after launch we got a direct lead for new home construction. Then I built my wife a new site for her real estate company at mktexas.com. What would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and taken weeks took about 10 minutes a site.

I was able to take 25 years of experience, all the instincts and opinions about what works, and combine it with a tool that moves as fast as I can think. The result is work that's 10x better than anything I could have produced on my own. I thought the game had passed me by. I'm starting to think it just changed the rules.