The good bad & ugly of vibe coding your new home on a 19 USD P/Y Carrd site 😈 (not sponsored)

With the LinkedIn algo going all 'YOU SHALL NOT REACH, (BuT pAY YOU WILL)' on us mere mortals, I thought the time was right to get serious about my owned online home.

While I already set one up 2 years ago on Carrd Inspiration, it was mostly to get my domain henkjanschrijver.com out there and indexed by Google, Bing Search and the rest.

Since I've been building 3 new brands from scratch this year: HYPE DECODER, Remoter.news & Carian.art, the next step was to upgrade my own home to coordinate it all. Be it the corporate site of my solo empire. 😈

This time I was eager to test the limits of Carrd and experiment with vibe coding. I'll go into detail soon in a new post via new my free newsletter on Ghost: www.schrijver.email (the one you're reading now) But here's some food for thought for y'all.

I used:
- Carrd as CMS (I have a 19 USD Pro plan)
- BBEdit to work in the HTML/CSS
- IA writer to write copy (no AI, IA! It's a barebones text editor for pros)
- Affinity Designer for logos/images
- A few different browsers to test it
- Claude for coding, Perplexity to wade through forums

The good

- Carrd is a breeze to work with, regardless of skill level.

- The available templates are fine for most people.

- While it's actually a one-pager, you can solve sections and menus in different ways, check the hamburger menu on henkjanschrijver.com and the button menu on remoter.news.

- Claude is by far the best coding help.

- You don't need to set up a serious stack like with Vercel.

- Setting up large HTML/CSS documents is done in a sec.

- I make quick work of copy & design since I know what I'm doing and what direction I want to take it.

The bad

- You don't have a serious stack like with Vercel. That means you'll have to problem-solve your way around the Carrd limitations like limited embed space/characters.

- Claude tends to get tunnel vision in order to solve a problem and has a tendency to even mix up data you didn't ask it to touch.

- Since you didn't set up the large HTML/CSS documents, you end up looking for logic in places where it's not necessarily present.

The ugly

- The other LLMs would contradict the solutions of Claude & vice versa. I tested fixing errors that the Claude code threw up in a browser with ChatGPT and even CoPilot input. That only made things worse.

- Maintenance of the embeds will have to be done via BBEdit. I didn't bother with GitHub this time. That's for the next version. Not that it needs big updates as it's mainly a profile site. But I couldn't hand this off to someone else without lengthy documentation.

Tl;DR

I managed to do everything in about a week. But that's because I'm an expert copywriter, webdesigner and webmanager who's been doing this for almost 20 years.

I know my way around HTML/CSS and that made maximizing it and solving problems fairly easy.

It can be a great flywheel, but just like with writing, you'll lose a lot of the gained time checking + reprompting. 🤷‍♂️