AI Didn't Build My New Website. It Just Stopped Letting Me Pretend I Couldn't.

My website wasn't broken. That was almost the problem — it worked exactly as designed, and what it was designed to say was "I don't know what I'm doing." Nobody told me that. I had to figure it out myself, which either makes me perceptive or six months late to my own party. Probably both.

Here's the math I hadn't done: if my website — the thing housing my portfolio, the thing that exists specifically to convince someone to hire an instructional designer — felt lifeless and disengaging, why would anyone assume the eLearning I built for them would feel any different? I wouldn't make that leap of faith. I've sat through enough dead, disengaging training to know better than to bet on a stranger's promise that "no, really, my actual work is good, I swear." And I definitely wasn't clicking through to a portfolio page to find out, if the homepage had already told me everything I needed to know.

But say someone did make it that far — did go looking, did click through. What were they actually going to find? A three-minute video clip of an interactive Storyline course, published as a video. Not interactive. A video of interactive. Because I didn't know how to code, and Squarespace's block-and-template system will let you display a lot of things, but "let someone actually click through your interactive eLearning" isn't one of them. So the one piece of proof I had that I could build engaging, interactive learning was, itself, neither engaging nor interactive. That's not irony, that's just bad advertising.

And even that video only showed the last five feet of a much longer race. Most portfolios show the finished product — here's a course, look how polished. Mine did that too, and it was still incomplete, because building the course isn't the hard part and it isn't the part that separates a real practitioner from someone with six months of Storyline tutorials under their belt. A lot of people are moving into this field right now as developers, not as practitioners — they can build a course, but they've never run a full analysis, never figured out that the actual fix for a performance problem is sometimes a job aid or a process change and not a training module at all, never heard of Kirkpatrick Level 3 or Level 4 evaluation, let alone conducted one. None of that was showing up on my site either. I've done all of it. My portfolio needed to say so, and needed to show that I can do the things others either don't want to do or don't know how to do.

I learned this lesson in the Navy, over twenty years ago, long before I built truly interactive eLearning or even this website. After each watch, we'd do a daily area cleanup — and sometimes that first swipe of a chem-wipe sprayed with Simple Green showed you how dirty everything actually was. That first swipe was my portfolio. The area around it was the entire website.

The colors themselves were easy — I originally chose shades of blue and grey because I like them, because I'm most comfortable with them, because they speak to me. I wasn't about to change that. What I didn't have was the right shades — the specific tones that would make the palette feel alive instead of just present. So the colors stayed. The exact hex values didn't.

The navigation was uglier than I'd admitted to myself. Every individual page — contact, appointments, portfolio, the works — sat in the header as its own link, and it looked exactly like what it was: cluttered and dated. I built a collapsible side panel instead, one the viewer can show or hide, which sounds like a small fix until you realize how much visual noise disappeared the moment it existed.

Then there was the product-image problem, which I'd assumed for over a year was a Squarespace limitation — square crops cutting the tops and bottoms off portrait-oriented product photos. It wasn't a limitation. I just hadn't found the setting. Once I did, every product image on the site actually shows the entire product, which is a genuinely embarrassing thing to fix sixteen months in.

And then accessibility, which I'd said I took seriously, but didn't fully understand what that actually meant. It was a priority when rebuilding my site, and it's a priority now when I'm building eLearning. Every time I do something, I'm asking myself: is this appropriate color contrast, would someone who's color-blind still be able to distinguish what I'm showing them, do the closed captions actually line up to the audio script, are the alt-text labels accurate — and so on. That's not a question I asked once and closed out. It's a question I ask now, every time, and a check I run every time I create a new product or make a major change to an existing one.

Every one of these fixes followed the same pattern — I didn't know what I didn't know, until something forced me to find out. The exact shades. The crop settings. My own understanding of what accessibility actually required. Small on their own, but together they're the same lesson on repeat: you don't find the gap until you go looking.

Here's the part I actually want to be honest about: I knew I could do better. I'd known it for sixteen months. What I didn't have was the execution — the specific shades that would take the palette from dirty to clean, the interactivity and small subtle touches most visitors won't consciously notice but will feel, the ability to actually show the full breadth of what I do instead of one flat video clip standing in for all of it. AI didn't hand me any of that as a talent. It's not a talent. What it did was take the eye I already had — twenty-five years of knowing what good instructional design looks like — and let me finally build to it, instead of building to the limit of what I could code by hand. I knew what "better" looked like the entire time. AI is what let me stop just knowing it and start shipping it.

Learning to vibe code and using agentic AI to formalize processes and run routine analyses is helping me be a better instructional designer. Not because AI is doing the designing for me, but because it's enabling me to finally ask and answer a question I'd avoided for years: what have I been doing on autopilot, never once stopping to check if it could be done better? I doubt I'm the only one who's been coasting on habit somewhere without noticing.