Today I woke up to find that Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, had enthusiastically shared this new site across the interwebs as a great example of what can be done with AI in WordPress.
I was very flattered by the attention, and the positive feedback that followed was a nice bonus. I built this site for many reasons, one of which was to prove to myself that AI can do great things in WordPress, and that WordPress is great in our AI era.
I found both to be true: Claude did an amazing job of bringing my brief and vision to life. I hadn’t built myself this much needed site for many years because I couldn’t bear to have a site I didn’t absolutely love. Now I do, thanks to AI.
It wasn’t just a few prompts
By the way, building this site was not a matter of one or two prompts, and we’re good to go. I’ve been building this over many hours over the last few weeks, with many iterations to improve every little detail of UI (which I can do because of AI!), performance and accessibility.
I also had to coax Claude into structuring the site according to WP best practices. It got it right in a lot of ways, using custom fields and custom post types in the right places, and I loved that it created the contact form based on a vanilla form that using the wp-mail function! No need for a contact form. But the first version of the theme hard-coded almost all the text. We moved everything into the page editing area, moved image management to the Featured Images, etc.
When Claude gets stuck in its own head
Sometimes Claude got stuck in its own head about things that prevented it from solving a problem. There was an area with padding that I wanted it to fix, but the code kept not helping. Instead of considering tackling the issue from a different angle, Claude kept blaming Elementor hosting’s aggressive CDN caching. After many tries it eventually figured out that the issue wasn’t the CDN, but its own fix.
My point is – working with AI is amazing, and it allows us to accomplish more, and aim for higher quality, in a way we wouldn’t have even bothered in the past. But it’s still time consuming, and needs good clear direction.
Why WordPress
On the flip side, I found WordPress to be a great basis for my site. Its solid infrastructure and well thought out architecture allows for effortless, logical content management. Thanks to the theming system, I’m able to constantly and easily iterate on the look and feel of the site with Claude: I give Claude direction, it creates a new version of the theme, I download it and upload it, and I’m done. No version control (yes it’s not for me), no CLI. Just files.
The extensibility of WordPress is also a win – I decided I wanted a quick way to test the Lightspeed score of my site after every major change. So Claude and I created a plugin for just that, I installed it, and now it’s humming away on my site.
Anyway, that’s some of the story behind this site. Thank you to everyone who visited it and shared feedback.
I plan on sharing more details on how I built it, and what I’ve learned along the way, so stay tuned!
