Welcome back, land of the internet. It feels so good to type that again.
About three months ago, Blog About Business was hacked. Someone calling himself "Mr Green" got in through WordPress and wiped my database down to about 1 MB. Years of blogs, case studies and plot twists, gone.
I tried everything
After being hacked, I tried everything to get my content, database or files back. I spoke to my hosting company several times. I asked friends who know far more about servers than I do. Still nothing.
So the blog sat there, broken, and I kept telling myself I'd deal with it "soon".
Today I gave it a go with Claude
This morning I decided to give it one more go, this time using Claude and the Claude in Chrome extension. That combo changed everything. Instead of me clicking around cPanel and guessing, Claude could look at the server through my own browser while I stayed in the driving seat. I logged in myself, and it did the digging.
And it found something nobody else had: an old database export from 2 March 2026, sitting on my own server the whole time. From that one file, about three hours after we started, I had back:
- 22 blog posts
- 6 pages
- 95 original images
I was so happy. Then we cleaned house. We removed the hacked WordPress install, an old subdomain and a stray database user, and checked for any sneaky extras like hidden FTP or SSH access, tokens, cron jobs or email forwarders. There were none.
The prompts that did the work
No magic spells and no fancy prompt engineering. I talk to AI the same way I'd brief a person on my team. A few of my real prompts from today, typos and all:
> Read the handover file and carry on from where we left off.
> please remove the testimonials from this page in the purple squares, we are pulling live from google now
> try again I have reconnected and am in the browser
That last one says a lot. It didn't all work first time. The browser connection wasn't set up at the start, a download got blocked, and I had to reconnect before Claude could reach my site. You don't need to be technical. You need to know what you want, and you need to keep going.
When Claude got stuck, I asked ChatGPT
Here's the part I want every business owner to hear. When something wasn't working inside Claude, I didn't sit and wait for one tool to get it right. I took the problem to ChatGPT, got a second opinion, and brought the fix back to Claude to put into action. Today it was just the two of them, but more AI tools will join the team as this rebuild grows.
No single AI is the boss here. I am. Each AI is like a team member with its own strengths, and my job is to know who to give the brief to.
Then I rebuilt the whole thing
I already knew I was going to rebuild Blog About Business. I just wasn't sure how I was going to do it. After this morning's wonderful surprise, it was clear to me.
So in the same afternoon:
- I chose a new brand look, Ultraviolet, with the same logo and the same me
- AI built the design system and a 7-page website mockup
- the new site went live at about 14:55, with no WordPress behind it this time
- the recovered posts went back up at their original addresses, so old links still work
- by the evening it had animations, SEO for search engines and AI search, my Google reviews and Search Console set up
From the first prompt this morning to a brand new site going live: roughly five and a half hours. Months of stuck, fixed in an afternoon.
So what's the new site actually built with?
No WordPress this time. The new site is plain old web code, the same stuff every website is made of underneath:
- HTML for the words and the layout
- CSS for the look: the colours, fonts and rounded corners
- a little bit of JavaScript for the animations and the blog filters
Claude designed the pages first, then wrote a small Python script that turns those designs into the finished pages. Those pages sit on my own hosting, ready to go.
Why does that matter? There's no database, no login page and no plugins, which is exactly where the hackers got in last time. It's much harder to break into, and because the pages are already built, it loads fast too.
Make AI work for you, not think for you.
AI did the work. I did the thinking.
AI did the digging, the coding, the checking and the heavy lifting. I made the calls: which brand, what stays and what goes, what my voice sounds like, and when something just wasn't right. That's the difference between AI working for you and AI thinking for you, and it's exactly how I work with clients as an AI Implementation Specialist and Digital Marketing Specialist.
This is the way forward
Today showed me where this is all going. It will no longer be marketing on its own. It will be systems that you build internally that do the work for you.
And we are going to be doing so many fun, awesome things. I have 3 dead brands that need serious coding, and I'm hoping to bring them to life using the systems I build with various AI tools and methods.
Follow the journey
This is EP01 of The Rebuild. Next up: the recap video from today, the new brand kit, and the AI agents that will keep this site running day to day. I'm timing every step, and I'll share the real numbers as we go. Pull up a chair and follow along.