AI, the Evolution of Web Building, WordPress, and Back Again

I’ve been reflecting on websites lately. How we plan them. How we build them. How we update and maintain them. I’ve built a few websites with AI—30 Days of AI and Bespoke Training are the main ones—but the core of my online presence, my personal website at TrisHussey.com, has remained firmly on WordPress. I’ve been building websites on WordPress since 2006 (at least). I’ve written three entire books on it. I’ve been pretty invested—personally and professionally—in WordPress; it’s big a big part of my professional identity.

Which makes it pretty ironic that I’m testing a completely WordPress-free version of my website using Astro and flat Markdown files. But that’s not the story I want to tell. The story, the lede, is how the whole business of website creation has come full circle from experts creating websites for us to AI experts creating websites for us. In both cases, we need extra help to keep our online presence up to date.

Key Takeaways:

• The Evolution of Web Design: Website building has shifted from manual HTML coding, through the WYSIWYG and CMS (WordPress) eras, to today’s AI-driven code builders.
• Modern Architecture: Moving away from traditional PHP/MySQL setups to modern, flat-file frameworks (like Astro hosted on Cloudflare) offers massive performance and design improvements.
• AI as the New Webmaster: Using AI tools to build and maintain websites allows for rapid deployment and iteration, freeing up creators to focus on higher-value work.

The Early Days: Hand-Coded HTML and Bespoke Web Design

If you started building websites in the early days, you’ll remember everything was hand-coded HTML. Lots of things we take for granted now—like CSS, browser windows bigger than 640x480, using more than 216 different colors—were a decade away. If you wanted a website built, you needed an expert to not just design and build it, but maintain it as well. This put everyone in the hands of a select few people who know all about servers, FTP, DNS, image formats, and web safe colors.

It was pretty tedious work. A lot of weird things to debug. Something would work in one browser, but not another (I’m looking at you Internet Explorer). Using transparent GIFs to space things out. Using tables to create layouts that are simplistic by today’s standards. We still made a lot of amazing things, and it ushered in the dotCom era, but this was an “expert’s” task to manage.

People were beholden to experts for everything (yes I was one of them), and we could charge pretty high rates for these services. Being a young web dev and “webmaster” then, I didn’t mind having that kind of income, but my tune would change over time.

Just not yet though.

The Rise of WYSIWYG Editors in Web Design

Microsoft FrontPage, Claris Homepage, GoLive Cyberstudio (later Adobe GoLive) were some of the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML builders. You still needed to use FTP to upload the files. And changing something as simple as a footer across an entire site meant a lot of find and replace. Sure there were server-side includes. Which worked sometimes. Some of the tools I had some idea of a “template,” even then, when you made a change to a menu bar or footer, in the background the app was re-writing and re-building all the individual files.

While I remember being pretty dismissive of FrontPage (it did write terrible code), this was the start of people being able to take back control of their websites. They could update pages themselves. They could create new layouts and designs. The pages might not have been the most “professional looking,” but they were theirs.

While web design houses were pushing the boundaries of design and catered to businesses with sizable budgets, SMBs were able to do more on their own. It was a breakthrough era for the web. It let businesses “get online” in droves. It set the stage for Web 2.0, and the social media era.

But there was a transition period where control was wrested from people and back into the hands of experts again—the rise of the CMS.

How WordPress and CMS Platforms Transformed the Web

We all got pretty sick and tired of having to upload files all the time; especially when changing a footer on a large website could mean having to upload hundreds of files. Then people realized that maybe if layouts were put into global templates and the content stored in a database, updates would be easier. If people were able to just work with a web based editor to update the content, it became less likely someone would mess up an entire site with a tiny error in an HTML file.

Blogs were some of the first tools to really bring this to people en mass. While Blogger is still around, many of the other early tools have faded away—Blogware, Typepad, Moveable Type—then one broke out from the pack and became the undisputed leader in its class—WordPress.

While WordPress was great at building a blog, using it to create an entire website was a tricky thing at first. There were special plugins to manage. Different settings for homepages and content. Building a website with WordPress moved in the realm of the expert again. People who knew how to set up self-hosted WordPress sites—before the days of the one-click WordPress installs. People who knew how to fix theme and plugin errors. FTP (now sFTP) came back as how we got sites set up. The website builders had gone totally online, like Wix and Squarespace, but WordPress was giving people a lot more control and flexibility. You could have your website on your own host (again) and be in control of everything.

At least if you either knew how to do it or could hire someone to do it for you.

This was when I realized I wanted to help people take back control of their websites. It’s when I started writing my books and teaching my WordPress classes. I really enjoyed helping people feel empowered and in control of their websites again.

It wasn’t long before WordPress moved from a blog engine to website builder; ushering in the second wave of people bringing the remaining businesses online. WordPress powers something like 30% of all websites now, but except for version updates, the architecture of PHP and MySQL hasn’t changed a bit. This seems to be putting WP at a disadvantage versus the newest platforms. It’s getting a little dated. Sure it works, but it also seems limiting and inflexible. Even the whole theme and plugin structure makes things harder than it needs to be.

It was the whole reason behind Cloudflare’s EmDash release. Moving away from the PHP-MySQL world to newer alternatives. I am no expert on platform choices, but it intrigued me. I was tempted to play around with it, but I didn’t really have the time , or energy, to dive into it and learn a new system.

On the other hand, I had been thinking about my personal website for a while. It has a pretty sizable technical debt. Lots of uploads (nearly ten years worth) and hundreds of posts. The site has felt sluggish for a while, but most of all I knew the design was tired. It needed, I needed, something new.

So I had an idea, calling up Antigravity I asked for options, picked an Astro and flat file set up system hosted on Cloudflare, and walked through building it. All told it think it really only took a few hours. If I had been able to just focus on it, it would have been done in a day, two max.

And it wasn’t just moving to Astro, it included:

• converting all the posts and pages to Markdown
• moving all my uploads to a new Cloudflare R2 bucket
• new colors
• new layout
• new logo
• new focus on my AI consulting work and less on content and writing
• moving my domain DNS to Cloudflare (which has helped speed up my WP site tremendously)
• setting up page hosting on Cloudflare

Not a small amount of work. But steps like the first build and demo site came together in about five minutes (from a PRD and sprint plan). The conversions from XML to Markdown, automated with a library. Pointing all the posts to use the R2 bucket for media took Antigravity 30 seconds. Even going through some iterations on the design, colors, and icons, took just a couple hours.

I probably could have built a decent WordPress site in the same amount of time, but the design would be stock, not custom. I know I would have had to mess with image paths and permalinks. I know that even if I spent hours on it, it would only kinda be ready for prime time by now. In contract I have a completely new and updated site where the hardest thing I had to decide was if the color pallet was what I wanted and if the logo looked how I wanted.

The site is live now at staging.trishussey.com, feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. I am going to edit and update some of the page content, it’s not 100% in my voice and a little generic, but…small details.

Which brings me to how web design seems to have come full circle—we’re back to needing experts to help us with our sites, but this time the expert is AI.

The New Era: AI Code Builders as the Modern Web Developer

I have no idea, not a bit, about how the Astro framework is built. I know it’s popular. I know it’s a solid option to build things on, but until I read up on it (I’ll get there), I don’t know much about it. Antigravity downloaded the components, built all the files, set it up for me to push to GitHub so I could deploy it to Cloudflare.

When there were errors, I asked Antigravity to diagnose and fix them. When I wanted to change the layout. Antigravity. When I needed to understand how to update posts or create posts or update pages. Antigravity gave me the instructions. My “webmaster” is now AI. If something breaks, I need it to fix it. And if I happen to be out of usage at that moment—I guess I’ll be SOL until it resets (or I pay a little extra money).

To leverage new technologies. To make my site faster. To make my site look better—complete with a new logo—I relied on something else to do the legwork. But I don’t think this is a bad thing. AI has unlocked so much for us. I can create a new app or website in a few hours or a weekend. I can have several tasks running, things like research or compiling documents or creating GA4 reports, while I do other things that bring more value. Having a website that I’m not 100% able to edit myself, is a small tradeoff I think.

What’s Next for AI and Web Development

I think my new site is ready to go live—I do hesitate because of all these years on WordPress and how much I’ve invested into it. I’m in no rush to do it, so I’ll just let things sit for now. Sure I’ll have some duplication for a bit—this post will be on Substack, my current blog, and new site—but it’s a pretty small thing to deal with.

What are you building with AI? What would you build with AI if you wanted?