This spring I started a project that I have wanted to do for years: modernizing a bunch of older pages on Conaway.org so they look better on smaller devices.
Many of the photo and video pages here were written before smartphones and tablets were around, and like most websites of the early-to-mid 2000s they were not built with smaller screens in mind, so those old pages don't render as well on mobile. I’m fixing that (with a little help).
Over the last 25+ years I have spent hundreds of hours working on this site. A labor of love for sure, and one that I have enjoyed, but it has taken a lot of time to do all the image and video editing, web page development, tweaking, testing, uploading, etc. Most of it done by manually writing the code.
So I decided to look into some of the Artificial Intelligence tools (like Grok and Claude) to see if they could help with the heavy lifting of updating old web code so I wouldn’t have to do it all by hand.
It turns out they can, with amazing results.
With AI coding tools, I write a prompt describing what I want on a page—a particular layout, photo gallery, video, headers, footers, navigation, backgrounds, links, fonts, forms, whatever—and the AI writes the code and delivers me a perfectly formatted file to download. It often suggests improvements that I hadn’t thought to ask for.
I usually make a few minor tweaks to the code before publishing, but the majority of the work is done for me, and it’s usually excellent. At times I’ve had a little “chat” with the tool to describe some subtle change I want, or to tell it to correct a misunderstanding. It will reply something like, “Oh yes, I see now what you are trying to do. Let me make this adjustment...” and we go back and forth a bit until it delivers the fix I’m looking for. It’s like talking with an expert human programmer who works very fast. It’s incredible, and fun to use because it frees up time to think creatively since I’m not consumed with the technical minutiae.
For upscaling old images, I found an app called Topaz Gigapixel. It uses AI image algorithms to take low-resolution photos (from older cameras) and convert them into higher-res versions that look great on modern screens, large and small. Just point the app to a folder of images, give it some basic specs, and let it work.
This is a big project with several hundred web pages to update and hundreds more images to optimize. It will take a few months to finish, but AI coding help has made it manageable.
~ Stacy