Forget About the Things you Forgot About

When one is new to vibe coding, it's common to miss some steps in the development life cycle. Here are the most common things that vibe-coders forget about while building.

1. Somewhere for the information to land

The moment: you build a booking form. Where do the bookings go?

This one surprises people, so it's worth being clear about. A web page is a bit like a printed leaflet that happens to be on a screen. It can show things beautifully. It cannot remember anything. When your customer closes the tab, whatever they typed into your lovely form is gone as completely as if they'd never typed it.

To remember something you need somewhere for it to be kept — a place that's still there tomorrow morning. That's what people mean by a database, and setting one up normally means signing up for something, paying for something, and about nine steps you didn't ask for on a Sunday afternoon.

What happens instead: every Gledit site already has one. It's there from the moment the site exists, you don't set it up, and you don't pay extra for it.

Which means you can ask for things like this and just get them:

Add a booking form — name, phone, the job, and when suits them. Keep every booking so I can look at them later.

Put my services and prices in a list I can add to later without editing the page.

The bookings, the enquiries, the reviews, the properties, the class timetable — whatever your business needs to remember, there's somewhere for it to go.

Two things to know. You can read what's come in without building anything: there's a panel in the editor that shows you everything the site has saved, and lets you clear out your own test entries.

And the honest limit: anything stored this way can be seen by someone who really goes looking. It's right for bookings, sign-ups, products and prices. It is not the place for anything you'd mind a stranger reading — which is exactly what number two is for.

2. The email that never arrives

The moment: the form says "thanks!" and sends absolutely nothing. You find out three weeks later when somebody asks why you never called them back.

This is the worst one on the list, and it's the worst because it doesn't look broken. The page does exactly what it appears to do. There's no red text, nothing in your junk folder, no clue at all. Just a customer who thinks they contacted you and a business that never heard from them.

The reason is simple once someone tells you. Sending an email isn't something a web page can do on its own — it needs a mail service and a password to use it, and anything you put into a web page can be read by anyone who visits it. So a page can't hold that password. It genuinely cannot send you mail by itself, no matter how confidently it says "thanks, we'll be in touch."

This is also the single most common thing an AI website builder gets wrong. It'll write a convincing-looking contact form, because a convincing-looking contact form is easy. The part that actually posts the message to you is the part it can't do.

What happens instead: your contact form is part of the platform rather than part of the page. You tell it what to ask for and where to send it, and the enquiries come to your inbox — reply straight to the email and it goes back to the customer, like any normal message.

Underneath there are a few decisions you'll never see unless something goes wrong, and they're the reason this is worth trusting:

• Every message is written down before it's emailed. Email is the part that can fail for reasons nobody can control — a mail server having a bad afternoon. So the message is saved first and sent second. If the sending fails, the enquiry is still sitting in your panel, flagged as not emailed. You never lose the job.

• There's a trap for bots. A hidden box no real person can see or type into. Anything that fills it in isn't a person, and it gets a polite "thanks" and goes away — because telling a bot it failed just means it comes back and tries again.

• Replies go to the customer, not into a void. Hitting reply does the obvious thing.

One thing to know: emailed forms come with the paid plans. On the free plan your enquiries are saved to the site instead and you read them in the panel — you get every message, you just go and look rather than being told.

3. Being findable

The moment: there isn't one. That's exactly the problem. Nothing breaks. You simply never turn up when somebody searches, and you never find out why.

Search engines don't read a page the way you do. Before they get anywhere near your photos or your prices, they look for a few specific, boring things: a proper page title, a short description, and a couple of behind-the-scenes files that tell them which pages exist and that they're allowed to look at them. Miss those and your site still works perfectly for anyone who already has the link — which is why nobody catches it for months.

That same handful of details is what decides whether your link looks like anything when you paste it into WhatsApp or Facebook. A grey box with a web address in it, or a picture and your business name and a line about what you do. Same link. Different amount of work done to it.

What happens instead: the boring files are written for you and kept up to date on their own, the sharing picture and text are filled in, and search engines are told which address is the real one — which matters more than it sounds, because your site answers at more than one.

What's left is the part no software can do for you: the actual words. So there's a checker that reads your site and tells you, page by page, what's still missing — a title that's too short to say anything, two pages with the same title, a page with no description at all.

Then you fix them the way you do everything else:

Give every page a proper title and description. Say what the page is about and who it's for.

Worth knowing: there's also a switch that asks search engines to leave the site alone entirely. Turn it on while you're still building, off when you're ready to be found. It's on every plan, including free.

4. Hosting

The moment: somebody says "first you'll need to set up hosting," and you close the tab.

Here's what that sentence actually means, because nobody ever says: a website has to live on a computer that's switched on all the time, so it can answer when somebody types your address. That's it. That's hosting. Then there's the phone book that connects your domain name to that computer, and the certificate that makes it https and stops browsers putting "Not secure" next to your business name.

Those are three real things. The rest of what usually comes bundled with the word "hosting" — installing tools, running builds, deploying — exists to solve problems created by the way big websites are built. You have a plumbing business. None of it was ever for you.

What happens instead: publishing is one button. Your site goes live at your own address with the padlock already on. When you're ready to use a name you own, you can point it at your site and we'll sort the certificate out — that comes with the paid plans, and the setup screen shows you exactly what to change with your domain company.

The bit that makes this comfortable: while you're working, your live site doesn't change. You have a working copy and a published copy, and pressing Publish is what moves one to the other. So you can do something drastic on a Tuesday afternoon and the site your customers see is still Monday's, right up until you say otherwise.

You can also look at your unpublished version yourself, on your phone, as a real working site — forms and all — before anyone else sees it.

5. Knowing if anyone came

The moment: you launch. You tell people. And then you have no idea whether it did anything.

Normally, finding out means signing up for an analytics service, pasting a bit of code into every page, adding a cookie banner because of what that code does, and then reading numbers that are partly wrong anyway because a lot of people block it.

What happens instead: your visits are counted as the pages are sent out. There's nothing to sign up for, nothing to paste in, and no cookie banner — because nothing is being followed around.

You get the things you'd actually want to know: how many people came, how many pages they looked at, which pages, and where they arrived from — Google, Facebook, a link somebody shared.

Where it's deliberately limited, so you're not surprised: it counts people, it doesn't follow them. Nobody's identity is stored, so somebody who visits on Monday and again on Thursday counts as a visitor on both days. You can see what's working. You can't see who anyone is — and for a plumbing website, that was never the interesting question anyway.

6. It was public the whole time

The moment: you send a client the link so they can have a look. So can everyone else. So can Google.

Every website is on the open internet from the moment it's published. There's no half-published. Nobody mentions it, because nothing draws attention to it — the half-finished version just sits there being visible while you're still calling it a draft.

If you ask an AI builder for a password page, be careful, because this is one of the few places where it will confidently build you something that doesn't work. It'll make a nice login screen that hides the page until you type the word. Somebody who knows what they're doing can get straight past it, and the information behind it was never protected at all. It looks like a lock. It's a picture of one.

What happens instead: there's a switch. One password over the whole site — every page, and everything the site has saved. Not a page pretending; the actual front door.

That covers a lot of real situations: showing a client their new site before launch, a price list you only want trade customers to see, a members' area for a class or a club.

Two things to know. It's one shared password, not individual accounts — everyone who gets in sees the same thing, which is right for a client review and wrong for anything where people need their own login. And you can't lock yourself out of your own editor by turning it on.

On plans: the password lock comes with the paid plans. The "leave me out of search results" switch in the last section is on every plan, including free, and it's often the one you actually wanted.

7. And the expensive one — you forgot to publish it

The moment: it's 90% done, it's been sitting in a tab for eleven days, and you're waiting to feel ready.

The first six are free to forget, because they're handled whether you knew about them or not. This one isn't, because nothing can handle it for you. It's the only thing on this list that's purely about nerve, and it's last because it's the one that actually costs you money — every week it isn't up is a week of people finding somebody else.

What's really going on is that publishing feels permanent. Like you're declaring this to be the version, and if it's wrong, it's wrong in public.

What happens instead: it isn't permanent, and that's not reassurance — it's how it's built.

Every change to your site is written down as it happens. Not a backup you remembered to take. Every change, yours and the assistant's, automatically, with a note of what it was and when.

Which gives you two things worth having:

• You can look at any earlier version — not just an old file, the whole site as it was that afternoon, clicking between pages. Have a look, decide, close it. Your live site never moved.

• You can go back, and then change your mind about that too. Going back to Tuesday's version doesn't erase anything; it just becomes the newest change. So Wednesday's is still there if you want it after all. There's no move here you can't undo.

So publish it. Publish it at 60%. The version in your head is never the one that ships, a real website somebody can visit beats a perfect one nobody has seen, and every single thing you do after you publish can be undone.

What all seven have in common

Not one of these is difficult. Every one of them is a solved problem, and any of them could be worked out by a determined person with a free weekend.

That's rather the point. Seven weekends — on databases, mail servers, sitemaps, certificates, analytics and passwords — before you get back to the reason you sat down, which was to have a website for your plumbing business.

And you never get to choose when. You don't decide to spend Saturday reading about email delivery. You get ambushed by it at the exact moment you thought you'd finished. That's what actually kills websites. Not difficulty. Interruption.

Having the boring half already done isn't a feature — it's the entire reason this exists. What's left for you is the part that was always yours: what you say, who you're saying it to, and what you want somebody to do when they land on your page.

Start free — one site, no card, and enough credits to build something and change your mind a few times. The place to store your bookings, the search-engine side, your visitor numbers, the full history and the publish button are all free. Emailed enquiries, the password lock and using your own domain name come with any paid plan.