Vibe coding is everywhere — Lovable, Base44, Claude Code, and a flood of Facebook ads promising "your website in 2 minutes." For designers, it's unsettling: these tools really can spin up a decent-looking site fast. So are they devaluing our work, or freeing us up for the work that actually matters?

In this episode, Olga (Applet Studio) and Wayne (Resonant Pixel Co) get honest about where AI website builders help, where they fall apart, and what it all means for the future of design as a business.

They dig into why AI-built sites are often "disposable" rather than real business engines, the missing CMS problem, why the copy is usually the weak link, and how the low end of the web design market is genuinely under threat. But it's not all doom — they also cover the shift designers need to make: from pixel-pushing to strategy, business development, and building community and confidence that AI can't replicate.

Plus a few practical wins: using Squarespace's brand settings to get genuinely good AI-generated draft copy, why giving clients copy to edit beats asking them for a blank-page draft, and the third-party workarounds (Zapier, Airtable, n8n) for populating repetitive pages at scale.

— What we cover —

• The rise of vibe coding and AI website builders

• Why AI sites are "disposable," not business systems

• The missing CMS and messy-edit problem

• Is AI devaluing design work? (yes and no)

• Why the low end of the market is most at risk

• Selling shovels in a gold rush

• Pivoting from pixel-pushing to strategy and community

• Getting good AI copy out of Squarespace's brand settings

• Why clients edit copy but won't write it

• Workarounds for repetitive pages at scale

Well Spaced is a podcast from Applet Studio and Resonant Pixel Co about design, business, and building online.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Google's updates wiped out another chunk of blog traffic — and if you run a content-based business, you felt it. In this episode, Olga (Applet Studio) and Wayne (Resonant Pixel Co) break down what's actually happening to search: AI Overviews answering queries before anyone clicks, Google quietly rewriting your meta titles and descriptions, and a patent that lets Google serve its own version of your page.

But this isn't a doom episode. They get into the strategy shift that's actually working: moving from informational blog posts to commercial-intent landing pages, why blogs still matter (just for a completely different reason now), and how LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are changing what "visibility" even means.

Plus: why search intent from an AI user isn't the same as a Google user, the role of social signals and testimonials, and why the real job of a business owner is communicating and delegating — not being the bottleneck.

If your traffic has been going up, down, up, down with every Google update, this one's for you.

— What we cover —

• The March Google update and the traffic drop

• AI Overviews and the "no-click" problem

• Google rewriting your titles, tags, and serving its own pages

• Why LLM traffic doesn't convert like Google traffic

• The shift from blog posts to landing pages

• Why blogs still matter (feeding LLM context + brand authority)

• Social signals, testimonials, and authenticity

• Building systems so you stop being the bottleneck

Well Spaced is a podcast from Applet Studio and Resonant Pixel Co about design, business, and building online

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Olga has built her entire client base online — SEO, templates, Zoom calls with strangers who found her on Google. Wayne gets the majority of his work through local relationships and referrals. Neither of them had really compared notes on this until now.

In this episode Olga asks Wayne to just explain it — how does local networking actually work, how much time does it take, and is it worth it for a web designer who isn't naturally a glad-hander? Wayne breaks down the approach he stumbled into almost by accident: joining a local business association, eventually getting on the board, showing up consistently without ever trying to sell anything, and watching trust accumulate until people are three beers into a happy hour telling him they hate their website.

The core insight is simple but easy to underestimate: in-person trust builds differently than online trust. When someone meets you face to face, knows your personality, has seen you show up month after month with no agenda, the moment they need a website you're already the obvious person. You don't pitch. You don't hand out cards. You just become the website person in the room.

They also talk about where local networking goes wrong — the BNI-style referral groups that feel like speed dating, chambers of commerce so large you could network for years and barely scratch the surface, and the exhaustion of trying to attend every event in town. There's a sweet spot in community size, and Wayne has a pretty specific take on what it is.

In this episode: why Olga finds in-person selling awkward and what's behind it — how Wayne's local strategy started out of loneliness, not a plan — the right community size for meaningful relationship building — how long it actually takes before referrals start coming in — why showing up without an agenda works better than any pitch — business cards and why Wayne still has most of his 250 — BNI and referral groups and why they felt gross — chamber of commerce vs. smaller local business associations — meaningful conversations as a trackable sales metric — and why the moment someone says "my nephew built my website" is exactly when you want to already be their friend.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.