madlab.ch: 22 pages, five languages, six times of day – built in conversation

Our own website madlab.ch is the first large website we built entirely in conversation with an AI assistant – 22 pages in five languages, without a content management system. It was the proof of concept for MADLAB // Publishing.

MADLAB built it, for itself. How it all started is told in How MADLAB // Publishing began.

The starting point

Our website was due for a facelift, and a bold one: a continuous stop-motion world made of clay and cardboard, with our team as characters and our office in Wabern as the set. The scenes were to follow the time of day in Bern – dawn in the morning, neon light in the evening.

At the same time we wanted to prove something: that a website like this can be built and maintained without a content management system. The rule was simple: no FTP by hand. Every change goes through the assistant.

What came out of it

• 22 pages: home page, six services with an overview, nine case studies with an overview, About us, How we work, Contact and Privacy.
• Five languages: German, French, Italian, Romansh and English.
• Six times of day: every scene exists in six versions, from 6 in the morning to 11 at night. The website shows the one that matches the current time in Bern.
• Motion: 67 short video loops bring the scenes to life without slowing the page down. The image comes first, the video fades in as soon as it has loaded.
• For search engines and language models: structured data, a sitemap and an llms.txt that says in plain words who we are.

How it was done

The images were made elsewhere, the website in conversation. We generated the stop-motion scenes and videos with image and video AI and then edited them. The website itself – structure, texts, design, languages, the logic for the times of day – was created in conversation with Claude, connected through the connector.

Files don’t go through the chat. A photo doesn’t fit into a conversation. We upload images and videos through a secure upload address that the assistant provides. We built exactly this feature while working on madlab.ch and the first client websites – see Uploading images and files.

Several people, one website. More than one person worked on the texts and case studies: one team member maintains pages with Claude Code, others in the chat. Every change becomes a version with author and time. Who changed what can always be traced, and every state can be brought back.

Published where the website has always been. madlab.ch runs on our existing hosting. When publishing, MADLAB // Publishing transfers only the changed files there. So you don’t have to move to work this way.

The result

An agency website that looks the way we wanted it to, and that we can still change in minutes. A new case study, a corrected sentence, an updated privacy policy: we tell the assistant, look at the preview and approve.

What we learned

• The assistant needs guardrails, not freedom. A website turns out well when the tools bring the way of working with them: read first, then build, check, preview, and publish only after approval. That is built into MADLAB // Publishing today.
• Languages need their own addresses. For visitors a language switcher is enough, for search engines it isn’t. They only find a language if it has its own address. We have just rebuilt madpublishing.ch that way.
• Images are half the website. Without a convenient upload for images and videos, every AI-built website remains a text draft.

Frequently asked questions

Can such an elaborate website really be maintained without a content management system?

Yes. The design is built once. You describe content changes in conversation, check them in the preview and approve them. No login to a content management system is needed.

Where do the images and videos come from?

They were created with image and video AI, edited, and then loaded into the website through an upload address. No files go through the chat itself.

Do I have to change my hosting for MADLAB // Publishing?

No. You can publish to your existing hosting, as we do with madlab.ch, or use our hosting in Switzerland and the EU.