A week ago I made a video about how my agency is done building WordPress websites. And in that week we built a few more websites with Claude Code, and I'm even more confident we're never going back to WordPress. However, our team's thinking about how websites should be built in the future is evolving quickly.
And in the spirit of building in public, I just wanted to share an update with everyone.
We've been building websites with AI in some shape or form for about a year now. And we've tried about every shape and form there is at this point. We now have a team of AI native developers whose only job is to figure out the best way to build websites for the future.
But this technology is moving fast, so like everyone else, we're figuring it out as we go.
In the last video, I mentioned that our brilliant web dev, Hana, had built our own custom CMS, complete with a user-friendly visual backend and a drag-and-drop page builder. And it is truly beautiful, and it works great. But as many of you pointed out in the comments, CMSs need to be maintained, and that's extra overhead.
Many of you pointed out that we should just use an existing CMS, like Payload or Sanity, And trust me, we have tried a lot. And it's not even that they don't work. It's just that we have big ambitions.
We have systems we want to integrate into these websites. And every existing solution we could find just had limitations we weren't willing to accept.
But in the last week, our brilliant consultant, Lucia, who I met on TikTok, asked a very important question. She asked, "Who are you building this CMS for? " It's important to us that all our clients own their own website.
We don't believe you should ever be locked in or dependent on a single vendor to update your website. And at this point, most people are used to a visual backend like WordPress, the drag-and-drop builder.
But then I asked our team, would you ever use the visual CMS? Would you ever use a page builder to design a page or make updates to the website? And unanimously, it was a no.
In essentially every situation, it's just way easier to ask Claude to update the website. And yes, you first want to apply those updates to a staging site and run deterministic checks to make sure it didn't break anything. But it's still just way easier.
And that's not because of some technical knowledge that our devs have. Updating your website with Claude actually requires less technical knowledge than it does with a page builder.
So at least as of right now, with the websites we're currently building, we're placing the bets. We're betting that AI is only going to get better. And that page builders and CMSs are probably going to stay exactly where they're at.
And that what you'll care most about in the future is that AI models like Claude can easily update and maintain your website in a way that's safe and secure. And yes, you'll still need databases and you may want to utilize reusable widgets that are maintained. But our bet is that the overhead of a visual CMS just isn't worth it anymore.
And I'm making this video primarily so that you can learn from our trial and errors. But I'm also making it for the comments section. In my last video, hundreds of people took the time to leave some really thoughtful comments.
And like three people left some not so thoughtful comments. But those thoughtful comments were incredibly valuable to our thinking process. So please, keep them coming.
Let's figure this out together.
