We need to talk about vibe coding because for 2025, this was the word of the year and I have to tell you, I'm not here for it. Hey, I'm Holly Christie. I am the host of this podcast, Websites Made Simple. I'm a website designer. I am a website designer and developer's mentor as well. and I am here to help you to have a career that you absolutely love without being run into the ground. So let's get started. I was at a conference the other day and I was sitting next to someone and it wasn't a web designers conference because they don't really exist, do they? We can change that one day. So I was at this conference and the person next to me was talking to the person next to her and she said, well, this is no problem. I can vibe code it. Now, this person is no way any form of website designer or developer or anything like that. And the person next to her said, what's vibe coding? It's just AI code you can throw into Gemini or Claude and it'll build you a website. And after I'd been a little bit sick in my mouth because this just so shouldn't be a thing. The person next to her didn't look impressed either, but I thought this conference full of other business people is not a place to address this. But lucky for you, this podcast is, as I've said, vibe coding, where we get AI to code the website. And there are a lot of vibe coded websites out there this year because there are a lot of people who are thinking we don't want to pay for a website. We don't value the website design. I don't think that people actually think I don't value using a website designer. But it can be a little bit like the difference between when you use a decorator to decorate your house or you choose to paint it yourself. You're never going to do as good job as the decorator does. And vibe coding is just like that. and I don't know whether you've come across many vibe-coded websites or even parts of websites, I will have clients come to me in a little bit of a panic and say, I had wanted something to work in a blog post or on a page I'm doing, so I took it to AI to get the code for it. And I put that code in there and it's not working. There are so many kind of good examples where you can take this to ChatGPT and you can say, could you code this thing for me? And chat says yeah of course I can Here you go Here the code And you put it in and it doesn work And you say to chat yeah that code didn work And then chat like yes of course it didn work It missing this And so you say OK can you code it again Let do it again And you can go back, forth, back, forth, back, forth. And all you're going to end up doing is just wasting everybody's time. There are times when we, I suppose I wouldn't really think of it as vibe coding, but there are times where we will use AI within websites. And you'll see lots of the website builders now do have AI built into them or AI options. And these can be great tools for making something very, very quick. So I'm old school. I will still look if something's gone wrong with the website. I will be, is it there looking at the code? I will be looking for the anomalies. I'll be turning off plugins. I'll be testing this. I'll be testing that. And sometimes it's much easier to say to chat or Claude or Gemini or whatever you're using, can you debug this for me. This is a great way of speeding up stuff when it comes to websites. We're not using it for the build. We're not asking it to generate reams and reams and reams of code. We're just saying, can you look at what's already there and tell me what's not working? Sometimes it's going to be able to do it. Sometimes it's not. And I think when it comes to using AI in web design, it's about using it for the times where it's going to be really effective and not using it necessarily for the front line of stuff, because that's really where the role of the designer or the developer comes in. Because even though these AI models are built on so much research and so much understanding and they're coming from tools like, you know, Gemini's owned by Google and Google are the ones who tells us really what they want the user journeys of websites to look like and all that sort of thing. Vibe coding just doesn't take into account user journeys. So it might say like, make this look really cool or make this happen or whatever else. But it doesn't do that role of guiding the user through the website in the way that I'm going to say still needs a human touch. Again, it's like if you get one of the chat GPTs or whatever it is to write the website copy, it's going to be well structured. Although if you've been working with AI generated copy, you'll generally see that it is not structured into SEO friendly structure, which I just always find crazy. It just says like, here's the heading for this and here's the heading for that. But it's not actually saying use this as a heading one, use this as a heading two, put your call to action in there it still takes that experience And this is why I really want to reassure you that I don think that you should be worried about vibe coding whether it the word of the year or not I just don think you need to worry about it because the people who value their website and the journey that it's going to take their users on and the experience they're going to have, which is going to take them all the way through to buying the products, the service, engaging with you, is the stuff that's still really going to come through from human design, human written content. And, you know, don't get me wrong, I do get AI to help me with writing my content. And actually, if you are signed up to my newsletters, then you will probably have experienced some of that because I will kind of format the story of what I want to say in the newsletter and I'll take it to ChatGPT, who knows me quite well these days, and say, you know, can we make this really palatable? And I want it to have this vibe and it's really good at doing that. If you're a website designer or developer who's looking to strengthen your community, get expert advice and not have it take up all your time, I've got the solution for you. My Sparks program is a weekly group mentoring call for people working directly in the web design space, where you'll get advice, support and collaborate with other designers. We meet each week for an hour and you'll come away with reassurance, knowledge and the next steps for your business. Check out the Sparks group mentoring at websitesmadesimple.co.uk. I like to keep AI on the more kind of periphery parts of my business. I feel like the websites are the products that I am handing over to people. And I want those to be robust. I want them to be fully tested. I also like using page builders for websites because I want the website to be something that the client can use once I've handed it over. I've talked before about having really good website practices. and it is not good practice to not give your clients an admin login, to not give them the site without them being able to handle it. And page builders, yeah, which have been around forever now, like people can be real purists about them and say, oh, well, I only recommend using a WordPress framework with ACF or something like that, which is fine. But I do think in this day and age, especially when business can be quite hard won anyway, it's quite important that owners of their websites can use their sites. And if the site has been vibe coded, they can't do that. The other thing that I've seen quite a lot of this year, and I even had happen this morning, is web designers who get in touch with me for mentoring and say they've just published a or they just about to publish the website and the client has a crisis of confidence If you have had this or you going through this feel free to get in touch with me because I know how much it can knock your confidence to have someone say, I'm not sure that this is the best it can be, or we've now published the site. I've had other people look at it and this is their feedback. It's really hard because people can absolutely tear people apart and tear the websites apart. whether they mean to do it or whether they're doing it to try and get new business or whatever else it can just chip away at your confidence if you have done the website and built it by human design let's call it that you've done it yourself then we can look at that website together and say right how can we strengthen this to help the client feel really secure within it when you're vibe coding it you can't do that because you're just taking ai's idea of what a website should look like. And you're just chucking that into the day spaces. Just it's not going to be a thing. The main thing I would say is don't feel threatened. Keep being absolutely brilliant at what you do best, which hopefully if you're listening to this podcast is websites. I'm not saying that vibe coding is going to pass, but I do think that people who are using vibe coding to build websites may end up coming in for, you know, I have my website clinic appointments where we work on website design together, or they might look at doing a more extensive website course. And they would definitely want to look at doing an SEO course there as well. So don't feel threatened. Just keep being brilliant at what you're doing. If you have a vibe coding story, I would absolutely love to hear it and to get in touch and let me know. You can find me at hello at websitesmadesimple.co.uk. You can find me on LinkedIn as Holly C. Christy. And on the website, the hello at websitesmadesimple, if you'd rather leave a voice note, I love a good voice note, visit the podcast page. You will see that there is a form there. Right, until next time, happy designing and see you again. Are you a website signer looking to have a great career? Get more clients, have strong processes and so much more. Well, I've got you. Head over to websitesmadesimple.co.uk forward slash email and I'll send you resources directly to your inbox every week to ensure that you have the career that you have always dreamed of. that's websitesmadesimple.co.uk forward slash email and I'll see you there
