I landed in Ghana October 2026, and it happened again.

That feeling. The warm air when you step off the plane. The first “akwaaba”. Your shoulders dropping before you have even left the airport. It does not matter how many times I come back. It is always there, and it is always great.

For a long time I have wanted to hold on to that feeling a little longer, and to hand it to people who are not standing where I am standing right now. People at home who walk past good places every day. People abroad who miss it. People who have never been and are still deciding. People who are counting the days until they return.

So I built something. It is called GhanaNice, and it is live at www.ghananice.com.

What GhanaNice is

GhanaNice is a guide to good places across all 16 regions of Ghana, powered by the people who have actually been there. It is for locals and visitors alike.

When you open the site, the map of Ghana spins through scenes from around the country before settling on Independence Arch in Accra. From there you can explore every region, from the coast to the savanna. Each region has its own page with the places worth the trip, real photos, quick facts and local businesses.

There is also a section on the most visited places of 2025, and a wall where people share the spots they found nice.

The part I care about most is the simplest one. If you know somewhere good, you can add it. There is a short form on every page. Tell us the place, add up to three photos, and send it in.

Why now: December is coming

If you have been in Accra in December, you know. The flights fill up, the city fills up, and a huge number of Ghanaians and friends of Ghana come home from all over the world.

Every year I watch the same thing happen. People land with two weeks, a long list of family visits, and the same five places everyone already knows. Meanwhile there is a waterfall in Volta, a mosque in Savannah and a canopy walkway in Central that would have made the trip.

I want GhanaNice to be the answer to “where should we go?” And I want the answers to come from people, not from a brochure. So many of us in the diaspora carry a favourite place in our heads. I am hoping this December some of those places end up on the site.

How I built it: the tech stack

This is The August Dispatch, so you know I am going to show you what is under the bonnet. The good news is that it is simpler than you might expect.

The site itself is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no framework and no build step. That was a deliberate choice. A guide to places should load fast on a phone with a weak signal, and the fewer moving parts there are, the fewer things can break.

Hosting is on Vercel, connected to GitHub. When a change is pushed, the site updates on its own within a minute or so.

The tip form runs through n8n, my automation tool of choice. When someone shares a place, a workflow receives it, tidies it up and sends it to me for review. Nothing goes on the site until a human has approved it. That human is currently me.

The photos are saved as WebP files in three sizes, so a phone downloads a small version and a big screen gets a sharp one. A couple of small Python scripts handle the resizing and build the credits page.

The little touches include a looping video of Independence Arch and a water animation in the footer drawn with WebGL, which is the technology browsers use for graphics.

One rule I set early: every photo must show a real, named place in the region it is filed under, and every photo is credited. No invented landmarks.

The vibe coding part: Codex started it, Opus 5.5 did the heavy lifting

I did not write this site by hand, line by line. I built it by vibe coding over the course of a few weeks, which means describing what you want in plain language and working with an AI model until it exists.

The project started in Codex, the coding tool from OpenAI. That is where the first version took shape.

But Claude Opus 5.5, working through Claude Code, did the heavy lifting. Most of what you see on the site today came out of that partnership.

Here is one example from this week. I told it the opening animation did not feel smooth. That was all I had, a feeling. It recorded the animation frame by frame, found a gap between the photos where the wrong image was flashing through, found a stall just as the reel landed, and rebuilt the animation so it runs properly. I did not have to know what to look for. I only had to notice that something felt off.

That is the lesson I keep coming back to for anyone curious about AI and not sure where to start. You do not need to know how to code. You need taste, patience, and the willingness to say “that is not right yet.”

What is not finished

I would rather tell you than have you find out.

Some regions are thin. Ahafo, Oti, Bono and Western North only have a handful of photos each. A few places on the site have no photo at all yet. The visitor figures for 2025 only cover the top five places, because those are the only numbers published so far.

This is exactly where you come in. If you have a good photo of a good place, the site needs it.

Frequently asked questions

What is GhanaNice?

GhanaNice is a free website that helps people find good places to visit across all 16 regions of Ghana. It is built from real photos and from recommendations shared by locals and visitors.

How do I share a place on GhanaNice?

Go to http://www.ghananice.com, choose “Share a nice place”, fill in the short form and add up to three photos. Every submission is reviewed before it appears on the site.

Can you build a website with AI if you are not a developer?

Yes. GhanaNice was built by vibe coding, starting in Codex and then mostly with Claude Opus 5.5. You still need a clear idea, a good eye and the patience to keep asking for changes, but you do not need to write the code yourself.

The takeaway

Ghana is nice. I have always known it, and three days back on the ground has reminded me all over again.

GhanaNice is my way of sharing that with you, wherever you are reading this. The site is up now. Have a look, find your region, and tell me what I have missed. Feedback is welcome, and so are your favourite places.

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