We have rebuilt nivo.co.uk, and we did it differently from any site we have built before: with Claude, an AI assistant, working inside Elementor through Elementor MCP.
The new site is now live. This is an account of how we built it, not a results case study. Results will follow once the site has been live long enough to measure.
Why we started with our own site
When a new way of building websites appears, the sensible place to try it is on your own. If it went wrong, the only client affected would be us. It also means that when we talk to a business owner about this approach, we are describing something we have done.
The rebuild happened on a private staging copy. The live website was not touched until launch.
We started with a plan, not a page
The assistant did not begin by building anything. The first job was a full sitemap: every page, its address, its purpose and the search topic it should serve.
Pages were then built in small batches. Each batch was reviewed by a member of our team and signed off before the next one started. Nothing moved forward on the assistant's say-so.
The design system came first
Before any real pages existed, we agreed the design system: the colour palette, type styles, spacing and buttons, all stored inside Elementor as reusable settings. We also built a small set of reusable components, such as the case study feature and the project cards that appear across the site.
This turned out to be the most important decision we made. With the system in place, every new page starts from the same foundations.
Our first pages looked too alike
The early pages were tidy, consistent and, side by side, a little too similar. Left to itself, the assistant reached for the same arrangement of sections each time.
So we set a rule: there is no single page template. We built up a library of section layouts, and each page is composed from it according to what the page is for. A case study, a guide and a service page should each look like what they are.
Checking every page on every screen size
Each page is checked at desktop, tablet and phone sizes before it is approved. The assistant adjusts the layout for each size, and a person looks at the result.
Those checks have caught real problems, including images sitting at uneven heights in a grid and screenshots of client websites being cropped at the sides. The second became another rule: a screenshot of someone's website is always shown whole.
Protecting what the old site had earned
A redesign changes page addresses, and that is where search rankings are most often lost. For our own site we mapped the old addresses to their new equivalents, wrote a title and description for every page, and rebuilt the blog templates so our existing articles carry across without being rewritten. The legal pages have been carried over word for word.
It is the same ground we cover in our website redesign SEO checklist.
The mistakes we caught
The assistant is quick and capable, and it is not always right. A few examples from this project:
In one older article, several images did not match the websites they were meant to show. They were removed.
A client's website address had been assumed and was wrong. It was corrected against the real site.
A check of every internal link found links pointing at pages that had moved or were no longer being built. All were corrected before launch preparation began.
None of these would have been found without someone checking. That is why we work to fixed content rules: real screenshots only, client reviews quoted exactly as written, and nothing stated that we cannot back up.
What a person still does
A member of our team directs every stage: setting the task, reviewing the result, asking for changes and approving the work. Some steps are deliberately kept in human hands, including page addresses, the SEO settings, the redirects and installing the header and footer.
During the rebuild, the assistant worked only on the staging copy.
What we learned
Planning matters more, not less. The clearer the brief and the rules, the better the result.
The design system has to come first. Without it, speed just produces inconsistency faster.
Variety has to be designed in. It does not happen by default.
Everything needs checking by someone who knows what right looks like.
The finished pages are ordinary Elementor pages, so our team can edit them in the usual way.
We have drawn the wider conclusions together in where AI speeds up a redesign and where people still matter.
What happens next
The new site is now live. Once it has been live long enough to measure, we will report what changed, including anything that did not go to plan. In the meantime, we've turned what we learnt into a free Elementor v4 upgrade readiness checklist.
In the meantime, you can see how we run client projects in how it works, meet our Elementor experts, or look at the results we have delivered for clients.
Thinking about your own website?
If you are weighing up a redesign, talk to our team of Elementor website designers about what this would look like for your site. Book a call, and we will give you an honest view of where we would start.
