How Did I Make My New Website?
As a professional web designer in the age of AI, how did I make my new website?
Did I use AI?
Of course I did.
Claude even told me to use AI, but not AI only.
I also used WordPress (with Elementor), connecting the two of them with WPVibe. WPVibe allows your AI platform (in my case Claude, but it works with ChatGPT as well) to update WordPress. You can save a lot of time and effort this way. For instance instead of customizing the color of your links, just tell AI what you want to do and it is done. Don’t bother updating your plugins one-by-one, ask Claude to do it for you – even on multiple websites at once.
I see AI as a (low level) staff member. I tell it what to do, and it does it, but it also needs heavy supervision. And the supervisor needs to know more than the staff member in order to both instruct and correct. At some points, as with many AI commands, I thought of another (better) way to do something or problem-solve (because, yes we ran into plenty of problems). Claude would consent that what I thought of was a better way and we would change direction (for instance instead of styling paragraphs one by one, I suggested we make a template). On the other hand, Claude knew how to do a lot of the tedious work better than me such as finding exactly where to change the font size of a certain element like titles of blog posts). Claude also could create HTML or CSS quicker than I could. For that matter, since I am a designer and not a programmer, it could also create PHP snippets to customize the site which I do not know how to do. Unfortunately for him, this does mean my programmer has less work, but that is a subject for a future post.
Depending on AI to build your whole site is dangerous. Besides the fact that AI makes mistakes, when you create a site with AI only, you are dependent on that platform. If the company where you made and hosts your website closes or exits, your website may no longer be supported. It may not exist. You do not own your website and the technology that built it so you are totally dependent on another company.
We all depend on third-parties to run our business, but we do not depend on them exclusively. We can always change our lawyer or accountant, but if you are wholly dependent on the platform where you built your website, you are in a very vulnerable position. For instance Yahoo bought Fickr and shortly thereafter, Yahoo closed Yahoo Photos. Tens of millions of Yahoo Photos users had to migrate around two billion photos to another platform. So don’t think it can’t happen to you.
What about my website? My website is built on WordPress which is not proprietary (no one owns it). I can move it to a different hosting company and use a different web designer at any time. I can update it either manually or with AI. I am not dependent on one or another.
As Claude, itself, suggest to me, I do not need to sacrifice one for the other. I can continue to design websites using stable, time-proven tools which afford me my mandatory condition of owning my own website, while also using AI to do so more efficiently and quicker. Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it too?