How to Build a Website That DOESN’T Look Vibe-Coded | Ryan Law (Ahrefs)

Tim Soulo (0:00)

A skilled marketer can essentially launch a side hustle in the weekend, something that would otherwise take a team of people a few months to do.

Ryan Law (0:09)

This is something greater than just information arbitrage. This is not just an RSS feed of content. There is like a bit of thought and attention paid to this. In order to make this an actually good website that adds value above and beyond the other aggregators that exist on the Internet, what do I want to see? How can we add that to this website?

Tim Soulo (0:25)

Why do you say we?

Ryan Law (0:26)

Me and the AI agent, you know, ripping together, brainstorming. That's how we work. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Soulo (0:31)

If you don't want your website to look sloppy and if you don't want people to close it as soon as they see it, there needs to be some effort.

Ryan Law (0:39)

It's very easy to make any kind of website now and Google does not like commodity content, you know, websites that just rehash what is out there. And I think spending tokens is a form of effort if you use that in a way to like get better data or better images or build cooler user experiences.

Tim Soulo (0:53)

How long did it take you to build this website?

Ryan Law (0:55)

Literally less than a day from idea to finished website.

Tim Soulo (0:59)

How much did you spend in credits in tokens?

Ryan Law (1:01)

So...

Tim Soulo (1:05)

Today I have Ryan Law, our own head of content at Ahrefs, who launched a pretty cool website, essentially a marketing conference aggregator, which is completely web coded and Ryan did it all by himself. And when I opened this website, I was impressed how well built it is, how good it looks and how many interesting features and unique capabilities that that website had. So a thought occurred to me that if I wanted to build that website myself like Ryan did, I wouldn't necessarily know where to even start. So I wanted to invite Ryan to Ahrefs Podcast and break down how he built this website so that maybe for our listeners that could give ideas of how to launch their own side hustles with the help of web coding.

Ryan, welcome to Ahrefs Podcast.

Ryan Law (1:50)

Thank you for having me. I never thought I'd hear you say you were impressed by something I vibe coded, but here we are. This is the future now.

Tim Soulo (1:58)

So can you please share real quick what the website does, and then we'll go step by step how you were building it?

Ryan Law (2:04)

Yes, absolutely. So it's called Conference Spotter. And it is basically a massive aggregator of all the upcoming marketing conferences in the UK for the next year.

It basically solves the problem I had, which was it's really hard to find upcoming conferences. You have to go and look in loads of different places and search around and know the right people. And it tries to solve that by pulling it all into a central feed. And then it pulls out information that I think is really important about each event. So there's some really utilitarian stuff about ticket prices and availability. But then there's some cooler stuff, some like qualitative ways to judge each conference and workout, whether it's the right fit for you to attend personally. Basically trying to solve my own problem, you know, want access to a constant feed of upcoming marketing events to attend, to speak at, to know which ones are interesting.

And yeah, built it in basically a day with AI, which is kind of fun.

Tim Soulo (3:01)

And what I also loved is how well designed it is. So you actually designed the mascot for this website, which looks pretty cool. And I also wondered like, how did you do that? How many tools and apps you had to stitch together to create this website? Your website has a lot of moving parts. There's design, there's data that you have to find, like on the internet about the conferences, there's unique data that you have to create for every conference page, all the photos and everything. Where did you start?

Ryan Law (3:30)

Yeah. So everything was done in Letaido. So I've literally, I didn't even leave the app, even wants to do it, which was kind of nice. The very first port of call was just, can I get information about conferences into one webpage? Is that possible? So trying to go out and aggregate and scrape from a few sources to try and work out, is it even possible to get like a live feed of websites?