Welcome to the first post of my new blog. The most appropriate way to start is by sharing my experience with you about why I decided to dust off a WordPress setup, how much has changed since I first started with WordPress, and why I decided to use this platform instead of a no-code platform such as Lovable.

I first started my blog two decades ago. It was a blog about real estate as I was an active real estate agent at the time. I was pretty fixed on using WordPress. The platform was (and still is) versatile, easy to use, and effective. SEO was great. I kept my website theme pretty simple, and minimalistic. And everything was just amazing.

Then… I killed my website. After two decades of actively trading in real estate as a Real Estate Broker, my role changed. I took on a leadership role. I became the lead guy on tech and marketing for the brokerage I worked for. And I didn’t really need my blog anymore. Kinda sad, considering the number of years I worked on it, and the articles that had accumulated on it.

But it was time to move forward.

I struggled with what platform to use to re-launch a ‘personal brand’ website to showcase the work that I do. I seriously considered using some of the WYSIWYG drag-and-drop editors though that idea was short lived.

Then, AI became a ‘thing.’ Platforms such as Lovable and Replit came out. I was hooked.

Creating a website on Lovable became too easy. Almost a joke. Good or bad… debatable.

I thought about what kind of website I wanted. And I prompted it. Then magically… poof. It came to be.

A retro 90’s style website… done.

A matrix style techie website… done.

I was a prompt-addict. Punching away at my keyboard as quickly as my ideas for website themes came to me. And it would deliver.

But there was one problem.

I just didn’t feel it was… a website. I mean, yes, it was a website. But not my website.

I’d look at the source code. And because AI based no-code platforms generated their magic using JavaScript… you couldn’t really read the code. It would just link to a JS to run the content each time a page is loaded.

This was great. But I asked myself, “How do search engines (and AI) look through this stuff and know what my website is about?”

One of the things I am trying to figure out is how rank-able an AI generated website is. If you’ve got some insight for me, I’d love to learn.

In the meantime, I tried to get Gemini to ‘code’ a WordPress theme for me. And while it came close, I just couldn’t figure it out.

So I found https://fullsiteediting.com/ — generated this basic WordPress theme you’re looking at right now, and am happy to be back on WordPress again.

Full disclosure: as much as I love using AI tools to speed up some of the mundane tasks related to things I work on, and to amplify my abilities in building some pretty awesome stuff, I write every single word you read here on my own. Yes, 100% human. LOL.

Forgive the grammatical errors. I type as quickly as my mind processes what I want to share, and I publish and forget about it. Mostly.

I hope you enjoy reading some of this as much as I enjoy writing it.