Fifteen creators logged in from Cameroon, Ghana, and the United States. Most had never built a website. One had only a phone. Ninety minutes later, the workflow was theirs — and it works whether you are sitting in a co-working space in Limbe, a tent in Nakivale Refugee Settlement, or a coffee shop in Brooklyn.
"You could be half drunk and three years old and code the way I'm going to teach you. This is meant for you to be able to play around with. You can't do anything wrong. You cannot mess anything up." — Tah-Lah, 12 minutes in
01 The Workshop Was Never About Coding
This session was billed as a website-building workshop. What it actually teaches is something larger: how to use AI as a collaborator instead of a crutch, how to centralize your work on a platform you own, and how to be discovered by the new search engines — the ones with names like Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and ChatGPT.
The framework is part of Media Company in a Box, the curriculum I built over eleven years of media production, six incarcerations, and a global deployment that is now active in Bafut Kingdom, Cameroon and Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda. This workshop was recorded on the road — in Limbe, on the Southwest coast — as part of that same deployment. If you watched the earlier Cell Phone Sovereignty Workshop field report from Cameroon, this is the next layer. The phone gets you into the game. The website is where you build the empire.
The demo site I built live during this workshop is here: theworldsmayor.systeme.io/the-worlds-mayor. It exists for one reason — to backlink my main hub, joshuatberglan.com, and prove that anyone, anywhere, on any budget, can stand up a real piece of media infrastructure in under two hours.
02 The Pre-Work That Makes Everything Else Possible
Most people fail at website building before they ever open a builder. They fail because they sit down with no raw material — no organized links, no hosted images, no bio they actually like. So they spend three hours fighting their tools and quit.
The workshop began with a single document. One page. Every social media handle, every podcast feed, every YouTube playlist embed, every image link. You cannot build a multimedia blog from memory. You build it from a list.
What goes on the list
Every Account You Want Discovered
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube. The newsletter URL especially — that one gets pulled into AI search results more than any other social link.
IMDb & Google My Business
IMDb is your media résumé. Google My Business is how local search and Google's AI surface you. Both are free. Both take an afternoon. Most creators never set them up.
Podcasts, YouTube Playlists, Newsletters
Copy the YouTube playlist embed code, not just the URL. Each playlist becomes a self-contained channel inside your blog. RSS, Medium, LinkedIn Newsletter — all free, all indexable.
Imgur-Hosted Image & Video Links
Use the i.imgur.com subdomain. Append .png for images, .mp4 for video. Label every file descriptively — chatbots use those labels to write better code.
A Bio You Actually Like
If you can't write one, ask the chatbot. There is no shame in this. I have learned more from chatbots about how to communicate clearly than I have from most humans.
A Photo — Real or AI-Generated
No photographer? No budget? Use an AI headshot tool. Anyone who tells you that's lame has never built anything from nothing. Use what you have.
Imgur images are the workshop standard for a reason: the i.imgur.com subdomain serves the raw file, not the gallery page. When you paste https://imgur.com/abc123 into a chatbot, it will sometimes pull the wrong asset. https://i.imgur.com/abc123.png always works.
03 The God Mode Prompt
Here is the secret most people miss: you don't need to know how to prompt. You ask the chatbot to write the prompt for you.
That single move flips the entire game. You stop trying to perform expertise you don't have. You let the model do its actual job — which is structured language work — and you bring it the only thing it cannot generate: your authentic raw material.
In the workshop I typed a deliberately ugly version of what I wanted, told the chatbot it was a terrible prompt, and asked for the best version. Then I pasted my entire link list as fuel. Forty seconds later I had a thousand-line, mobile-responsive, SEO-and-AEO-optimized webpage. Was it perfect? No. Was it close enough to refine into something powerful? Absolutely.
"I have four certifications in AI. They're pointless. Why? Because if I don't know something, I just ask the chatbot and it'll tell me. It will do the same thing for you." — Tah-Lah, on credentialism
04 Pit the Chatbots Against Each Other
I ran the same prompt through three models on screen. None of them produced the same result. That is a feature, not a bug.
Cleanest output. Animated section reveals out of the box. Remembered I was colorblind and chose gold and cream tones I could actually distinguish. If you only pay for one chatbot, pay for this one.
Strong at long, single-output code generation. Canvas view lets you inspect the result without losing the conversation. Good first-draft generator.
Bold design instincts, occasional errors. Sometimes ignores instructions and inserts its own ideas. Useful for design inspiration even when the code itself needs heavy editing.
The technique I demonstrated on the call: generate in one, refine in another. Take Grok's bold aesthetic, paste it into Claude, and say "borrow what's superior from this and add it to yours." The chatbots don't compete. You do. They are tools, and like every tool, they get sharper when you use more than one.
Think of it the way a child plays divorced parents against each other — except instead of asking for ice cream, you're asking for production-grade JSON-LD schema.
05 Paste, Break, Fix, Save
This is where most workshops would tell you everything goes smoothly. Mine doesn't. It broke on screen, in real time, three different ways — and that is the most valuable forty minutes of the recording.
Because real website building is not a clean tutorial. It is paste, watch it fail, screenshot the failure, send it to the chatbot, get the fixed version, paste again. The skill being taught is not "build a site." The skill is resilience inside the loop.
The system.io quirk that confused everyone (including me)
When you drop generated HTML into a system.io Raw HTML block, the editor often shows nothing but a gray placeholder. It looks broken. It isn't. The builder suppresses JavaScript and complex CSS in edit mode to protect its own interface. Hit Save. Hit Preview. The page renders fine on the live site.
The DOCTYPE rejection problem
If system.io throws "code is not valid," it almost always means the generated HTML contains a full document structure (DOCTYPE, html, head, body tags). Tell the chatbot: "I am using system.io. It rejects code containing DOCTYPE. Please rewrite from script-to-script structure only." It will. Same code, restructured. Pastes clean.
06 The Step Almost Everyone Skips
Once your page is live, open Google's free Rich Results Test at search.google.com/test/rich-results. Paste your URL. Let it scan.
This tool tells you whether your structured data is valid — meaning whether the Article, Video, FAQ, Course, and HowTo schema you embedded in the page is actually being read by Google. If it is, your page will be eligible for rich snippets, video carousels, FAQ accordions, and most importantly, AI answer surfaces.
Written content is indexed. Audio is transcribable. Video can be indexed too — but only if you give it the VideoObject schema markup. Without it, your embedded YouTube video is invisible to search engines that aren't YouTube itself.
If you want to be referenced by Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity when someone asks about your area of expertise, schema is the lever. The text alone is not enough. The video alone is not enough. The two locked together, with the structured data wrapped around them, is the unfair advantage.
07 Why a Website Beats Social Media — Always
Every platform you build on that you don't own can disappear tomorrow. I know this firsthand. I have been deplatformed before. The show that launched everything you see on my hub — Gratitude Unfiltered — does not exist on the original network anymore. The work survives because it lives on my website.
The book that built my entire platform, The Devil Inside Me , is the same case study. I wrote down twenty chapter titles before I wrote a single sentence. Each morning I asked God what to write, looked at the next title, and wrote the chapter. When the book was done, I created a short film for every chapter using B-roll, my own voice, and AI tools — no camera, no crew, no budget. I submitted those films to festivals. I won eight. The book became a bestseller in four countries. Total cash marketing spend: zero.
Your stories carry that same weight. The website is the vessel. Social media is the trailer. Don't confuse the two.
See the Workshop's Demo Site Live
I built this in front of fifteen people, on camera, in under ninety minutes. The exact site, with the exact errors and the exact fixes, lives at this URL right now. Open it on your phone and your laptop side by side — that's how you'll see the mobile-first work.
Open the Demo Site → Watch the Cell Phone Workshop08 For the Creators Who Showed Up Late
I stopped the recording about five minutes in to address something that matters more than any of the technical content: showing up on time.
How you do one thing is how you do everything. If you cannot show up on time to a free workshop, you will not show up on time to your livestream. You will not show up on time to the client call. You will not show up on time to the moment your audience expects you. The norm here in many places is to drift in late. That norm is a tax on every business you'll ever try to build. Pay it off now.
The creators who arrived on time built websites that day. The ones who arrived late are still trying to piece together what they missed. That is not a metaphor. That is the literal outcome.
09 Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to know how to code to build a website this way?
No. The entire method is built on copy-paste. The chatbot writes the code. You paste it. If something breaks, you screenshot the error and the chatbot fixes it. You do not need to read, write, or understand a single line of code.
Why system.io instead of WordPress or Wix?
Because system.io is free, has the lowest learning curve I have found, and supports raw HTML pasting natively. My personal main website runs on Duda, but I teach on system.io because the barrier to entry is zero — and zero is the right price for a creator who is just getting started.
What is AEO and why does it matter more than SEO now?
AEO is Answer Engine Optimization — how your content gets referenced when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, or Grok a question. Multimedia blogs with embedded video, structured schema, and labeled assets get pulled into AI answers. That is the new front page of the internet. SEO gets you into a search results page. AEO gets you spoken aloud by an AI assistant.
Why pit three different chatbots against each other?
Each chatbot has a different aesthetic instinct and different code-generation strengths. Claude writes cleaner code. Gemini handles structure well. Grok will design boldly but sometimes miss details. Running the same prompt in all three and then asking one to borrow from the others produces a stronger final result than any single one alone.
Why does video indexing matter on a blog post?
An embedded video that is properly indexed gives you a second front door to your content. Someone searching the topic finds your text article. Someone else searching the same topic on YouTube or in an AI assistant finds the video. The VideoObject schema is what makes that possible — and almost nobody includes it, which is exactly why it's an edge.
Can this method work on a mobile phone instead of a laptop?
Yes — and it is harder, but possible. Several attendees in the Limbe workshop only had phones. The chatbots all work in mobile browsers. Imgur works on mobile. System.io works on mobile. The bottleneck is screen real estate for editing, not capability. If a phone is what you have, a phone is what you use.
How do I get the deeper, hands-on version of this training?
The Guided Deployment Cohort is a four-week, done-with-you build of your full sovereign media stack. The Sovereign Architecture Consultation is the executive-level intensive for NGOs and enterprises building 500-community franchise infrastructure. Both link from the CTA below.
Build It Together — Or Build It With Me
The workshop teaches you the workflow. The Cohort builds your stack with you, beside me, in four weeks. The Sovereign Architecture Consultation is for institutions and NGOs deploying the full 500-community franchise model.
Book the Consultation → Send a Direct Message
