Soo... I built a website in 7 days!

The Problem of Gatekeepers.
For the last three years, Tatvaved had a problem. On the surface, their website worked, it had all the features it was supposed to have. But in practice, it was what you might call "archaic." It was clunky, unresponsive, and trapped behind a strange, old-school bottleneck: the team that built it charged a fee every single time Sherali wanted to upload a new blog post. When Sherali called me, the goal wasn't just to make it look better. It was to build a system that she could actually own, something that didn't require a technical degree or a transaction just to update a line of text.

I decided to see if I could solve this as a weekend project. I’m a big proponent of a tool called Framer, but to be honest, I had only ever used it for art projects and small experiments. I had never used it for a final commercial launch. But I had a hypothesis: because the original website already existed, we didn't need to start from scratch. We just needed to streamline the logic.

The Joy of Challenging
There’s a personal element to this. Back in high school, I tried to learn coding, only to be distracted by art, and ultimately didn't clear computer science. But even though I didn’t, I realised during this project that I had retained the most important part: the logic of how code works.
For the first time since 11th grade, I found myself in a position where my "design brain" and my "coding brain" had to work together. Usually, my work is partitioned, I’m either doing photography, or writing, or design. But here, those skills started to merge.
The first step was an archival one. Before we built anything new, we had to preserve the old. I backed up the entire WordPress database and used the Wayback Machine to archive the individual pages. This gave us a safety net. If we were going to strip the site down to its brass tacks, we needed to know exactly what those tacks were.

The Human-AI Collaboration
To move fast, I leveraged the tools available today. We went to the Framer marketplace—not to find a finished product, but to find a framework. It’s a much more efficient way to "mood board." Instead of looking at static images for inspiration, we looked at functional systems.

Then there was the content. Sherali provided about 70% of the material, but the rest was up to me. I used a combination of AI models to act as a filter. I used Gemini to structure the prompts and ChatGPT to check the copy against SEO guidelines. I think of AI as a very capable intern, you don't let it make the final decisions, but it saves you an immense amount of time if you know how to give it clear instructions.

Into the Trenches
But then, we hit a roadblock.
One of the most important things when you relaunch a website is making sure you don't break what already exists. Google had indexed dozens of Tatvaved’s old pages, and if someone clicked those links now, they’d hit a 404 error. That would make the entire project a failure.
Framer has a tool for this called "Redirects," but there was a catch: it was locked behind a Pro paywall. Since we were starting on a Basic plan to keep costs effective, I had to find a workaround.
I started searching the community forums and found a post from 2024. A user had shared a custom code component designed for this exact scenario. I took that code, but I couldn't get it to work immediately. This is where the AI came back in. I fed the code into the LLM, explained the logic of what I wanted to achieve, and we debugged it together.
I ended up building a "Redirect Page." Now, if you click an old link, the site doesn't break. Instead, you see a simple loading line that says "Arriving with mindfulness." It stays there for exactly 0.5 seconds, just enough time for the code to trigger, and then it reveals the new homepage. It’s a technical solution that actually fits the brand’s aesthetic.

The Jack of All Trades
Four weekends later, the site is live. It’s a Phase 1 launch: simple, functional, and clean.
There’s a famous saying: "A jack of all trades is a master of none." But most people forget the second half of that quote: "...yet better than a master of one."
This project was a testament to that. It required a bit of photography, a bit of design, a bit of writing, and just enough "failed" 11th-grade coding logic to tie it all together. We’re already planning Phase 2, including a blog system that Sherali can update via a simple Google Sheet.
The goal wasn't to build the most complex website in the world. It was to build a system that was relevant, fluid, and, most importantly, easy to use. And after three years of being stuck, Tatvaved is finally moving again.

If you end up going through the site, I’d genuinely like to know what you think. What works, what feels off, what can be better. Always open to feedback! :)