Then I ask if they’d want something like that.

“Well… but it looks a bit simple, doesn’t it?”

Simple is the word that keeps coming up. And I’ve learned that when a client says simple, they don’t mean easy to use. They mean not impressive enough. They mean what will people think. A lean, fast website doesn’t look like it cost anything. It doesn’t signal effort. It doesn’t say: we take this seriously.

The real irony is that building something genuinely simple, something that loads instantly and says exactly what it needs to say and nothing more, is often harder than bolting on a chatbot. But that’s invisible work. Nobody sees the restraint.

—

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry