Case study: building a bilingual website and an AI assistant for my own business in one day
Before taking on client work, I tried my approach on this very website. This is the real record of the project, including the mistakes that had to be fixed.
The problem
I needed a website to present my services: easy to read on a phone, in Vietnamese and English, and able to take visitors' questions outside working hours. There was one person to do it, with no design or development team.
The approach
- Write a one-page brief before starting. What the website does, what it doesn't, and what counts as done.
- Build the design and content with Claude. Claude wrote the theme code and the content drafts; I decided the name, the contact details and which services to list.
- Translate into English segment by segment. The website has more than 500 text segments, each with its own ID. When the Vietnamese changes, the system reports straight away which segments need retranslating.
- Add an AI assistant that answers from the articles. The website content is given to Claude as its reference. The assistant only answers within that scope, quotes no prices, and sends out-of-scope questions to the consultation form.
- Check with screenshots. Every major change was captured on desktop and mobile before going live.
Measured results
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Pages | 30 pages, each in two languages |
| Content | 10 articles and an AI glossary |
| Time | One working day (11 October 2026), from a blank page to live on the domain |
| Images | 10 public-domain photos, no licensing fees |
| Running costs | The domain fee; hosting on a free plan; the AI assistant is pay-per-use, capped at 300 questions a day |
What went wrong
- Overlapping menu. Adding the language switch made the menu bar overflow on mid-sized screens. The bug showed up in a screenshot, not from reading the code.
- A leftover old email address. An old email address stayed in the footer because it was stored in character-encoded form. The automated check after export caught it.
- Blocked image source. The photo library chosen first did not allow automated access, so we switched to a public-domain library.
The general lesson: AI works fast, but every step needs a check that doesn't depend on the AI itself.
What a person decided
The display name, the domain, the contact details, the list of services, the choice not to copy another website's content, and the spending cap for the assistant. These are decisions AI does not make on its own.
What hasn't been measured yet
The website has only just launched, so there are no visitor figures yet: how many people ask the assistant, how many answers are correct, how many consultation requests come in. This article will be updated when there are numbers.
Applying this to your business
This approach works for any business that already has written documents: price lists, policies, FAQs. When the assistant is switched on, the chat button in the corner of the screen is the live version. See the chatbot & AI assistant service or book a free consultation.