This is Technology Bytes, episode 178 for August 2nd, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bites on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
Today I’m continuing my microcast from last week where I talked about using AI for web development.
And in my head, having spent more time with AI at work and making things that display on the web, I mean, that’s the tools that we use at work.
It’s all in a browser.
So without any coding on my part or understanding really of how that code might work, I’m able to give data to my managers that they can use to better do their jobs.
And so I thought, I wonder how that might apply to my own personal website, which I really don’t use, but I just wanted to see where the world was.
And if you listened to last week’s show, you would see that I was extremely disappointed with how things went and what could be done and how AI could be used to develop websites.
Well, I’m a week into it.
I’ve learned some other things, and I’m ready to talk about them.
And really my opinion has vastly changed, and I’ll talk about that over the next few minutes.
As I had suspected when I started this journey, I assumed that AI would be good at doing web development because I had seen what it could do in my work environment.
And so looking for options, there’s money to be spent, and I don’t use my website to make money.
And I, you know, wasn’t looking to spend a bunch of money just to do this test.
And I came across WordPress work that uses AI to develop.
Websites, and generally it’s like 12 bucks a month or 13 bucks a month, and they had a sale going for a dollar a month for the first 12 months.
And so I’m like, well, I can spend 12 bucks.
So that is where I started.
Some of the frustrations that happened in that world were my own fault, and I’ll cover that momentarily.
And then in talking to customer support, not WordPress, because I use Ionos as my domain provider, and so that’s who I bought this WordPress work through, and it wasn’t working, and they said, You should try our AI app and SiteBuilder, and that’s like $19 a month.
I don’t want to spend that.
He said he could give me the first month for free, so at least I tried it.
And so I’m going to talk about my experience with both of those over the next few minutes.
Just a heads up, Ionos AI app and SiteBuilder is significantly better than what WordPress is doing.
I think I could spend maybe more money with WordPress, but I’m just going to go over it for a second here.
So in the WordPress setup, I broke it, and in calling them this week, my tech support people, they said, We’re going to have to erase it and just start over.
That’s what I wanted to do anyway because it didn’t really build a site that I really liked.
So this time I went into it, and it kind of walks you through and says, What kind of site do you want?
And I said, I just want a personal site.
I have a, you know, I might want to post a blog now and then.
I might want to post some pictures now and then.
I definitely want to link to my two podcasts that I do.
And so it made a website for me, and the website was Unspectacular and very busy and, I don’t know, it’s trying too hard, I think.
It’s trying to, you know, it’s really thinking about business, so I understand that.
But I didn’t tell it I was doing a business.
I said a personal website, so it’s really not good.
And so now the question is, can I edit it using AI and make it look like something I might want to use?
So here’s how the AI in WordPress works.
You type in like you’re doing in prompting in every AI type system, really, and then it says, you know, how can I help you?
And so I say, okay, this is what I want to do.
I want to change this picture.
And it says, well, the way you change a picture is, and then it walks you through the steps.
So that’s not really doing anything for you, but it is telling me how to use the WordPress dashboard to make changes to my site.
And so in that, it is helpful, but it doesn’t make any changes.
So I can’t say, I need a picture that does this, and it might try to find one.
There’s really nothing like that.
So it really leads you down the path of the things that you ask it, but doesn’t really perform anything.
You have to do that with some typing, with some drag and drop, with some search and copy paste and things like that.
But it really doesn’t perform anything.
Now, it will help you write.
So if there’s blurbs that you want to put under headings and doing those kind of things, you can have the AI in that WordPress environment help you do that writing.
But it really is a leader, not even a teacher, really, because it’s not teaching you how to do anything.
It is only showing you how the WordPress dashboard works, and that’s what I used to make my original website that I haven’t used for quite a few years.
That’s how I used it to make a business website when I was trying to start my own business.
And so I know how that dashboard works.
I don’t know if I’m very good at it, but I was able to set up my website.
So having this AI Point me in the right direction can be helpful on occasion, but it’s still not all that helpful to make a website and make it well.
The Iona system, on the other hand, is a full website builder, app and site builder as it’s called.
I haven’t explored the app side of that, but when I started that one, it did the same thing that the WordPress site did.
It says, What do you want to make?
And so I wrote that I have a personal site, I have this much experience in manufacturing.
That’s what I’ve done for work for all this time, production stuff.
And I’ve done, you know, some blogging, I’ve done podcasts, I’ve done these other things, and I’d like a place to post a blog every now and then, maybe post some pictures.
I want links to my two podcasts that I do.
And so it went through and built me a site, and I was impressed, and I really like it.
And so then I was asking it questions like, Okay, what was the choice between— oh, the first thing it did, sorry, I’m going to go backwards, was walk me through who I am, what I do, give me a little more information, and then it redid the site a little bit to make it more personal, and that was really cool.
So then I went in and said, Okay, I like this, and why was this design choice made?
And it says, It’s not a mistake.
This is what I did.
It makes it easier to read.
It kind of puts a gap in between whatever.
And so I thought, Okay, that’s a design choice.
I was just a little bit confused.
It almost looked like maybe they wanted to put a graphic in there or something.
But then I went in and said, okay, so I need to add links to my podcast.
And so it created cards and put links to that and put a text of what the podcasts were about because it said, hey, what are the podcasts about?
And so I told it about the two that I make and how long I’ve been doing it.
And so it made little blurbs and put a card with links to those pages where people can actually listen and read the transcripts or whatever.
And then I said, okay, now I also want to do a blog on occasion.
I also want a place to put photographs, so it added those things in.
And then I said, here’s a blog post, and I have blog posts that I’ve written from my original site.
So I just took that text and pasted it into the AI and said, this is a blog post.
So it looked at the data, it looked at when it was posted, it looked at the title that I had made because it’s a blog post.
That’s how we do them.
And it put it inside the link to that page.
And then when you open it, it’s nice, it’s consistent.
And then I just took a photograph, pasted it into the AI and said, here’s a photograph.
So it put it in the photograph section.
And I don’t remember if it put a title on it or asked me for a title, but all of the work that is being done to my site is being done by the AI.
All I’m doing is giving it prompts.
I’m putting things in the prompt, I’m copying text into the prompt, I’m asking it to do things, and it has been what I expected an AI to do in development of a website from someone who really doesn’t know the code and doing those types of activities.
The real selling point then on the IONOS version is That I wanted to show my wife what had been made, and I said, I didn’t do anything except tell it what I wanted.
And so she’s looking through it.
She goes, Well, why is this word not capitalized?
It’s in a title font, and the first word is capitalized, but then the second section is not capitalized.
And so I said, Just tell it.
And so she said, I think this word project should be capitalized in this header.
And, you know, the AI comes back as they do and says, Oh, that’s a good catch, so let me make that change real quick for you.
And then she said, I think we should do this.
And I said, Yeah, just tell it.
So she typed in some things that she wanted to change, and then the system went through and changed it, and she’s like, Wow, that is really pretty cool.
And I said, Yeah, I think so too.
Probably not worth 19 bucks a month because I don’t use my site to make any money.
And so I was calling today to cancel, and they cut the price in half, and it’s a month to month.
I can cancel anytime, so I might keep it for a couple months just for playing around and seeing what more I can learn.
But that is, that Ionos version is exactly what I thought AI would do.
So my mind has been changed.
I think AI can be very useful in building a site.
Now, I’m not making a company site.
I’m not making any stores.
I’m not doing any of that.
I do need to look at the app side of that and see what that means.
But AI does exactly what I thought it would do in the development of a personal website.
The WordPress one, not so much, because that, I don’t know what it is, but it’s a guide, not a performer.
And Ionos is a performer based on questions that you, or inputs that you give, and it just makes the website exactly as you would want that.
And then you just make the changes, it makes the changes, and you publish.
It just goes on and on.
So mine’s changed.
I don’t think I made anything groundbreaking, but it does look pretty cool.
It’s at merrigfamily.com if you want to see it.
Doesn’t really have much there at the moment, but it is a website, all done through AI.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes@merigfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
