lemmid.nl / Background / Built for change
Built for change
Getting a website made is easy. Having a website that is still right five years later, through everything those five years bring, is something else. Businesses grow, menus change, a location gets added, then a language, then a shop.
The platform principle
That is why Lemmid is not a one-off product but a platform: something you can keep building on, including things that did not exist at the start. Its building blocks are reusable (what works in one place works elsewhere too), flexible (blocks combine into ever new shapes) and extensible (new blocks click onto old ones). Anyone who ever played with Duplo knows the feeling. The builder wrote about it back in 2021, when he launched a new product in a single month from those same blocks (January 2021).
The principle keeps proving itself. In June 2026 the platform gained a new publisher that fits inside the existing Manager as a single file, and within ten days six websites were live on it (June 2026). No rebuild, no moving house: a new brick on the old ones.
Moving along instead of holding on
There is a lovely word for balance achieved by moving with change rather than springing back to the old: allostasis. The builder took it from Brad Stulberg's book on rugged flexibility (January 2025) and read on a year later about what you need when the familiar route ends (January 2026). That is exactly how your tools should behave when your business changes. Not longing for yesterday, but finding a new shape smoothly while keeping their value: firm at the core, flexible in form.
Change also arrives from outside, and then all at once: routine maintenance on the mail servers ran into a new version that wanted every setting done differently. It was fixed the same day and written down for whoever comes next (June 2025). Bending along is that too: absorbing the blow without the customer noticing.
The own rules move along too
Being flexible applies just as much to the platform itself. One evening in February 2026 a fifteen-year-old tool was rebuilt without any of the platform's own systems, and what came out changed how the builder thinks about all of them (February 2026). And what is done goes out the door: something eighty percent finished and in the hands of its user teaches more in a week than a perfect plan in a year (July 2026).
In practice that means: no rebuild for every wish, no moving house when you grow, no panic when things change. Just another brick on top.
Timeline
The pieces on willem.com this story rests on, by date.
- January 2021 · Building a product platform: a new product in one month from existing blocks.
- January 2025 · Master of Change: rugged flexibility, allostasis instead of springing back.
- June 2025 · Breaking Changes: a mail server upgrade that wanted everything different, absorbed the same day.
- January 2026 · Change Keeps Coming: what you need when the familiar route ends.
- February 2026 · The Best System Is No System: an old tool rebuilt without the own rules.
- June 2026 · Six Websites in Ten Days: a new publisher as a brick on the existing platform.
- July 2026 · 80% Is Better Than Nothing: ship, learn from real users, improve.
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