Geneva Pediatric Society Website

Project Overview

Several years ago, I started managing the IT infrastructure of the Geneva Society of Pediatrics. Although technically functional, it was based on a really old stack and aesthetically…hum…unpleasing.

The goal was to rebuild it from scratch, based on a more modern stack allowing for more flexibility for the admins, and hopefully nicer for the eyes to look at.

The amazing Payload CMS

The previous website was based on Joomla CMS and migrated in a hurry to Wordpress when Joomla stopped supporting the version it was running on.

As a true Wordpress hater, I wanted to use a stack that allowed for simple content management for the website admin (which is mostly me anyway), but allowed for full component customization, and that would ideally be open source. In particular, I wanted to simplify massively the content management of the website, such as the blog posts, the night / weekends duties for pediatricians, the database of the members of the association and the management of the resources available for parents.

This is when I stumbled across Payload CMS, a code-first, open-source, headless CMS. A lot of fancy buzzwords, but it was truly the perfect tool for this job. It essentially means I can define all content structure in typescript, through collections, fields, hooks. Since v3, the payload CMS service can be ran directly inside a Next JS application (at the time, NextJS was still a good idea), so it comes out of the box with routing, different rendering strategies, caching and improved performance.

A vibe coding experiment

I’m not a web dev, and honestly, I’m not interested in ever becoming one. I initially built most of the website myself, but a few weeks before launch, I checked what AI was capable of, and I was baffled. It was able to improve vastly on issues I was stuck on for weeks. It was my first time using these kind of tools on a larger project. Of course it’s web development, which has a ton of boilerplate code and very similar code structure across websites, but it still made me wonder what would be left for us to work on in a couple years.

Conclusion

The final website is now running live at https://pediatre-ge.ch. I’m satisfied with the final result, specially in terms of design, since it is not something I ever learned to do properly. However, web dev is clearly one of these areas where AI has become exponentially good at these past few years. I

I’ve also got very positive reports from members of the association and patients. This has been confirmed by search performance, with almost tripled the amount of traffic between May 2025 and May 2026.