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I Built a Website to Honor My Wife's Faith. She Wasn't Impressed.

• 7 min read • failure-files

Built my wife a tribute website during our family road trip. AI research, 12 iteration cycles, a live site in hours. She wasn't impressed. Here's what I learned about building fast vs. building wisely.

We were somewhere between Kansas City and my in-laws' house when Lindsay said she wanted to make a detour.

"There's this abbey in Gower. They found a nun's body preserved after four years with no embalming. I want to go see her."

This was part of our "Kalkman Family Kansas Christmas Adventure"—nine kids, Bingo the puppy, multiple family stops, and apparently now a pilgrimage to see an incorrupt body in rural Missouri. I'd read about Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster in passing. The discovery had made headlines in April 2023: an African American Benedictine nun, dead for four years, whose body showed remarkable preservation when exhumed for relocation to a new shrine.

What struck me wasn't the phenomenon itself. It was watching Lindsay. She'd done her research. She knew the story. She needed to go.

So we went.

The Abbey and the Gap

The Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus sits on rolling Missouri farmland—a traditional Benedictine community of sisters in full habits who chant the Divine Office in Latin. Sister Wilhelmina founded this community in 1995. She was 70 years old at the time, having spent decades fighting church bureaucracy to preserve traditional practices.

Standing in their small visitor area, reading the handouts about Sister Wilhelmina's life, I realized something: her story is incredible, and almost nothing good exists online to tell it.

Here was a woman born in 1924 in St. Louis under Jim Crow. She entered religious life at 16. When her original order abandoned traditional practices after Vatican II, she didn't leave quietly—she spent 30 years petitioning Rome until she finally received permission to found a new community. At 70. In rural Missouri. With nothing but conviction and what one observer called "a hell of a will."

The discovery of her preserved body is just the latest chapter in a life that was already extraordinary.

But try sharing that story with someone. You'll find scattered Catholic news articles, a sparse Wikipedia entry, and the abbey's own limited web presence. Nothing comprehensive. Nothing was designed to help someone understand why this matters or how to plan their own visit.

I was still thinking about this as we got back in the car for the next leg of our trip. Lindsay had dragged our whole circus to this place because something in the story moved her. Shouldn't there be a better way to share it?

So while the kids watched movies in the backseat, I started building.

Vibe Coding a Tribute

Here's what I love about AI-assisted building: you can turn car time into something real.

I pulled up Claude and started uploading the photos I'd taken—the handout materials, the abbey itself, Sister Wilhelmina's preserved remains behind glass. Then I asked Claude to help me research. Not surface-level Wikipedia stuff. Deep research into her life, the community she founded, and the medical and theological context around incorruptibility.

What came back was comprehensive: Sister Wilhelmina's childhood in segregated St. Louis, her decades-long fight for traditional religious life, the specific circumstances of her death and discovery, the investigation by medical examiners, the theological distinctions between incorruptibility and natural mummification.

This became my foundation. From here, I developed landing page instructions—voice and tone guidelines, section-by-section content, and the full narrative arc from her birth to the present pilgrimage phenomenon.

Then I handed everything to the Replit Agent to build.

The first version was rough. Images weren't working right—I'd referenced external URLs that had copyright and hotlinking issues. So I went back, downloaded proper source images from Catholic News Agency and EWTN, mapped each one to specific sections, and iterated again.

And again. About twelve cycles total.

Each pass added something: visitor information with maps and directions, a "what to expect" section for potential pilgrims, an FAQ addressing common questions, social share functionality, Open Graph tags for rich previews when shared. Every iteration made it better without starting over.

By the time we reached our next family stop, I had a live website: sister-mary.replit.app

The Workflow That Got It Done

For anyone curious about the actual process, here's what the build looked like:

Phase 1: Research Foundation

Phase 2: Content Development

Phase 3: Build and Iterate

Phase 4: Polish and Verify

Total time: maybe 2-3 hours of actual work, spread across a couple of stops on our way to the in-laws. The constraint of limited time actually helped—no room for overthinking, just shipping something real.

What I Got Right

The story-first approach worked. Sister Wilhelmina's life is compelling, independent of the incorruptibility discovery. Leading with her fight for traditional religious life, her founding of a monastery at 70, her decades of faithful persistence—that's the story. The preserved body is the latest chapter, not the whole book.

AI iteration compounds fast. Twelve cycles sounds like a lot, but each one is built on the last. Claude's research gave me confidence in the content. Replit Agent handled the implementation. The back-and-forth refined everything without losing momentum.

Personal connection elevates the work. My photos from our actual visit, combined with professional news photography, created something that felt authentic. This wasn't generic content farming—it was documentation of a real pilgrimage with real meaning for my family.

Filling content gaps is genuinely useful. When good resources don't exist for something meaningful, building one creates value. Someone else looking for comprehensive Sister Wilhelmina information now has a better option.

The Big Reveal

As we neared the end of our drive, I showed Lindsay what I'd been building in the passenger seat.

She didn't receive it the way I'd hoped.

I was disappointed, honestly. I'd spent hours on this—research, iteration, polishing something I thought honored her faith and the experience we'd shared. But her reaction reminded me of something I forget too often.

What I Actually Learned

Sometimes the person you're building for doesn't want what you're building.

I was caught up in the doing—the research, the building, the satisfaction of filling a content gap—and never stopped to ask if Lindsay wanted this. I assumed my admiration for her faith would translate into appreciation for a public tribute. It didn't.

That's okay. The project still has value. It fills a real gap. Someone searching for information about Sister Wilhelmina now has a better resource. The 12-section layout, the sourced imagery, and the FAQ addressing common questions—all of that serve potential pilgrims.

And I plan to offer the site to the Abbey itself. If they want a resource to help promote their location and share Sister Wilhelmina's story, it's theirs. That might be the audience this was meant for all along.

The lesson isn't that the building was wrong. It's that building for someone requires knowing what they actually want—not just what you're capable of creating for them.

What This Might Mean for You

If you're someone who builds—who sees gaps and fills them, who turns problems into projects—maybe this resonates.

AI makes creation faster than ever. You can go from idea to live website in hours, from concept to polished output in a single focused session. That speed is genuine progress.

But speed doesn't equal purpose.

The question isn't "can I build this?" The question is "should I build this, and for whom?"

Sometimes the answer is yes, absolutely. Fill the gap. Create the resource. Ship the thing.

Sometimes the answer is: maybe ask first. Or accept that the audience you imagined isn't the audience that needs it.

I still think the Sister Wilhelmina site is good work. I still think it serves people who want to learn about her or plan a visit. Offering it to the Abbey feels like the right next step—letting the work find its proper home.

The best AI-assisted builds start with clarity about whom you're actually serving. I got that one wrong. The project still worked out. That's the messy middle of building things.

Sometimes the builds work out differently than you planned.

Created with ❤️ by humans + AI assistance 🤖