I Shut Down My Speaker Website for 9 Months. Then I Vibe Coded It Back in Days.

In May 2025, I shut down my speaker website. Not because things were going badly — but because keeping it alive had quietly become a second job I hadn't agreed to take on.

WordPress plugins conflicting with each other. Theme updates breaking layouts at 11pm the night before a keynote. A contact form that stopped working for three weeks before I noticed. SEO settings spread across four different plugins, none of them talking to each other properly. Every time I wanted to change one sentence on the homepage, I was opening a page builder that felt like operating a small aircraft.

I killed it. Pointed the domain to my LinkedIn. Moved on.

Nine Months Without a Website

For nine months, my entire online presence was a LinkedIn profile. Bookings still came in — mostly through referrals and LinkedIn DMs. But I knew something was missing. Event organisers who didn't already know me had nowhere to land. The AI Essentials course I'd built at WiselyWise was invisible to anyone who found my name online. I had no place to publish thinking, no RSS feed, no structured way to show who I am and what I do.

I kept telling myself I'd "sort the website" when I had time. Anyone who runs a company knows what that means. Time never arrives on its own.

Then, in early 2026, something shifted. Not my schedule — my capability.

What Changed: Vibe Coding

If you haven't heard the term "vibe coding" yet, here's the short version: it's the practice of building software by describing what you want in plain language to an AI coding assistant, iterating through a conversation, and letting the AI write, fix, and improve the code — while you steer, judge, and direct.

You don't need to be a software engineer. You need to know what good looks like. You need to be able to say "the logo looks off-centre on mobile, fix it" or "the contact form should send a confirmation email to the person who submitted it" — and understand whether what comes back is actually right.

I've been building AI products for nearly a decade. I know what AI can and can't do. I understood the concepts of modern web development — components, server-side rendering, SEO metadata, structured data, API routes. What I'd never had was the fluency to write it all myself, fast, without spending weeks on tutorials.

Vibe coding closed that gap entirely.

What I Built — and How Fast

I rebuilt my entire speaker website in a few days. Not a template. A custom-designed, fully featured site with:

• A homepage designed for three distinct audiences — event organisers, business professionals, and corporate L&D teams — each with their own conversion path
• A speaking topics section with full talk descriptions
• An events timeline showing 12 years of keynotes across four countries
• A media gallery pulling live YouTube thumbnails
• A blog with full article pages, related posts, and proper SEO metadata
• A speaker kit download flow with email notifications
• A contact form with server-side validation and HTML-injection protection
• Security headers, structured data (JSON-LD schemas), a sitemap, an RSS feed, and an IndexNow integration that notifies search engines the moment I deploy
• A llms.txt file — a new standard that helps AI assistants accurately represent who I am when someone asks them about AI speakers in Singapore

Every one of those things, in the WordPress era, would have been a separate plugin to find, evaluate, install, configure, and maintain. Many of them I simply wouldn't have bothered with because the friction was too high.

With vibe coding, I described what I wanted. The AI wrote it. I reviewed it, tested it, pushed back where it wasn't right, and iterated. Done.

The same scope that took me months on WordPress — fighting the platform the entire way — took days with AI. Not because the work was simpler. Because the tool finally matched the task.

The Shift I Didn't Expect

The biggest change wasn't speed. It was where my attention went.

With WordPress, I spent most of my time on technical problems: why is this plugin broken, how do I add a canonical tag, why does the mobile menu overlap the hero image. The content and conversion strategy — the things that actually determine whether a website works — were always being pushed to "later."

With vibe coding, the technical layer became nearly invisible. I found myself thinking about things that actually matter:

• What does an event organiser need to see in the first ten seconds to decide to reach out?
• What's the right journey for someone who just heard me speak at a conference and scanned the QR code?
• How do I make the AI Essentials course visible without making the site feel like a sales brochure?
• What should the blog communicate that LinkedIn posts don't?

These are the right questions. These are the questions that determine whether a website generates leads or just exists. I've always known they were the right questions — I just rarely had the bandwidth to properly answer them, because I was always one broken plugin away from firefighting.

What This Means — For You

I've been in the room with CEOs, CXOs, and education leaders for years telling them: AI isn't something you adopt when it's "ready." It's something you learn to use now, while there's still a first-mover advantage in your industry.

My own experience with this website is a small but concrete proof of that argument.

The skill that let me rebuild this site in days isn't coding. It's the same skill I've been developing for nearly a decade of building AI products: the ability to work with AI clearly and deliberately — to know what to ask for, how to evaluate what comes back, and when to push back.

That skill is available to anyone. It doesn't require a technical background. It requires comfort with AI as a collaborator, and the judgment to direct it well.

If you're still treating AI as something to observe from a safe distance, or delegating it entirely to your IT team, I'd ask you this: what is the equivalent of my WordPress problem in your organisation? What is the thing that consumes disproportionate time and energy, that AI could take off the table — if someone on your team had the fluency to use it properly?

That's not a rhetorical question. It's the question I start with in every keynote. And in March 2026, it's the question that finally got me a website that works.

Want to build this fluency in your team?
The AI Essentials course at WiselyWise is where most people start — practical, jargon-free, and built for people who need to use AI at work, not study it academically.
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