Blog
Building a Website with AI: A Non-Expert's Journey
First, a few statements for context. I have no coding experience at all and don’t think of myself as very techy. I’ve wanted my own website for years, tried a few times through sites like Fiverr and my daughter’s generous attempt. But i’ve never been satisfied.
See the 4 lessons learned from this experience.
We don’t know what we don’t know.
I first go to the LLM that I often use and ask it to create code to create a site like this one: link to my model site. It says in a cheerily voice: “Absolutely!”. There’s no doubt in this model. But I don't know what to do with the code, so I ask it and it tells me step-by-step how to insert it in a Github repository to be able to see a preview.
I’ve always heard about Github and go over and try, but I quickly get lost. I tell it that I’m lost and I don’t have any experience. He tries to reassure me but my technophobia is too great.
I ask him if there is a way I can just give the model website and create a site from that. It seems that that should be easy, like it can look at the design or maybe access the source code and mimic it. It can’t do that … yet.
He lied to me.
What software created the model site?
It instructs me how to look at the source code …
But can i just copy the source code and you change the content?
No, there are ethical and legal problems with that, but you can take the parts that you like and copy them into my code.
But that means having coding knowledge and, remember, I don’t have that.
I’m beginning to get a bit frustrated; this is not the 15 minutes promised by that Instagram ad that keeps reminding us that teenagers are creating businesses while we still ask for revisions.
I do see the word “Wordpress” somewhere in the source code.
How do I do it on Wordpress?
It tries to tell me, so I go buy a Personal Plan but all the models he suggested are on the Business Plan.
Did he just lie to me?
Wordpress is Overrated
I go back to a suggestion he made earlier: use Visual Studio Code (even though that sounded quite techie).
Inside VSC is an AI agent: CoPilot. That sounds interesting. I write out a few paragraphs about what I want in the homepage, mentioning that model site, and then drag the photos I want to use into it’s workspace.
The html code begins streaming down, like a waterfall of letters and colors. Mesmerized, I had entered the matrix!
Let’s see if it’s any good …
Finally, after figuring our plug-ins, I preview it externally - it’s there! Not too bad.
Repetition Matters
After maybe 50 iterations later, it looks pretty good… just need to move that logo up one bar … Boom! The whole thing bonks out, photos are huge, text is bland Times font, colors are off. What did I do?
Hey, it doesn’t look right.
Oh yes, you need to Something something html something and Css style something, something, something.
LOL, he’s trying to trick me into coding.
But I don’t know how to do that?
Would you like me to create the patch?
Yes, create the patch, silly goose!
We continue like this for a few more hours and I’m getting that red-eyed dazed feeling I remember from that coding class back in college, somewhere in the 90s.
When the code seems to get long and messy (14 pages for a simple homepage), I take it back to the original LLM and ask for feedback.
It finds all kinds of problems, says it fixed it and to paste it back in VSC.
After a day or two, it’s finally 98% ready and that’s good enough for me.
Then, I had to figure out the difference between domains and hosting and then once my files were transferred … boom, It worked!
Lessons Learned
- Prompting matters. And this means words matter. I had to constantly reword my questions, getting more specific and detailed each time. The AI is only as good as my input.
- Use multiple AI models. VSC used a ChatGPT model for its Co-Pilot. When it seemed to get stuck I went back to the other LLM to get feedback. That “multiple perspective” really seemed to help.
- Learning happened. Even relying 100% on AI to create my website, I learned a ton. I learned the difference between Wordpress and Github. I learned the difference between a style sheet and an html page. I learned the difference between domains and hosting. I probably learned a few coding tricks as well.
- Vision matters. I had a model site that I initially used. Then I found another model site that I liked. This meant that I knew what I wanted. Without that it would have been hard to design from scratch, although the AI did offer some judgements about design in places.