Twenty Years of Websites, Changing Technology, and Building Again with AI
There is a difference between learning something for the first time and returning to it twenty years later.
The first time, you are mostly asking what can be done.
The second time, you are asking what is worth doing, what can be maintained, and which mistakes you have already paid enough to understand.
That is where I am now with website production.
The current site is not my first attempt at building something online. It is the latest point in a process that began in 2006, moved through several generations of web tools, wandered into self-hosting, survived discontinued software, and has now returned to WordPress with an entirely different collection of production tools available.
This is not starting over.
It is relearning the work.
Starting with 1&1
My first full website went online in 2006 using the website-builder software provided by 1&1.
It was limited, but it worked. More importantly, it introduced the basic reality of web publishing: you are always working within the boundaries of the tools, storage, connection, and hosting package available to you.
From there came Microsoft FrontPage.
That was an experience.
FrontPage made it possible to build pages visually, which helped many people enter website production without writing every line of code manually. It also had its own assumptions about how a page should be constructed. Once you pushed beyond those assumptions, things could become entertaining very quickly.
That is a recurring pattern in technology.
A tool may make the first eighty percent of the work easier while making the final twenty percent considerably stranger.
When the Web Started Moving
Then there was Macromedia Flash.
Flash made the web feel alive. It allowed animation, movement, interactive menus, introductions, and visual experiences that ordinary webpages could not easily produce at the time.
Naturally, I experimented with it.
There are still animations from that period that I would like to bring back to life. The problem is that creating something does not guarantee that the format will remain supported forever.
Macromedia became part of Adobe. Adobe eventually ended Flash support. Browsers removed it, devices stopped running it, and an entire generation of web material became difficult to access without preservation work.
That teaches an important lesson:
You may own the work, but that does not mean you control the format keeping it alive.
The file may still exist while the environment needed to open it disappears.
Trying Different Systems
At another point, I experimented with .NET Nuke.
Like other content-management systems, it offered a way to separate the material from the structure supporting it. Instead of manually constructing every page, you could work within a framework handling navigation, modules, accounts, and organization.
But every framework has its own logic.
You either learn that logic, work around it, or eventually move somewhere else.
Over time, I moved into WordPress more than once. It was flexible enough to support a simple site, a blog, or a larger publication, which is one reason it remained worth returning to.
That does not mean every return was simple.
Themes change. Plugins disappear. Publishing standards evolve. The WordPress someone remembers from years ago is not necessarily the WordPress they encounter now.
The name is familiar.
The workflow may not be.
Hosting a Website at Home
At one point, I self-hosted a website using Microsoft Home Server.
With a few modifications and workarounds, the system could be made to serve a public website. Technically, it worked.
Operationally, that was another matter.
Running a website from home means taking responsibility for far more than the pages. You are also responsible for the hardware, storage, power, network, router, backups, updates, security, and connection leading out to the rest of the internet.
If the power fails, the site goes down.
If the server fails, the site goes down.
If the connection changes or the router loses its configuration, the site may disappear until you repair it.
Then there is the internet provider.
Residential internet service is generally sold for consuming online services, not for operating public infrastructure. Even when home hosting is technically possible, providers may block ports, rotate IP addresses, limit traffic, or expect customers running commercial services to pay for a business connection.
Sooner or later, you learn that being able to operate a server does not automatically mean it is sensible to make your public website depend on one.
Technical capability and operational practicality are not the same thing.
What Paid Hosting Actually Buys
That experience changes how you look at hosting.
You are not merely renting disk space.
You are paying for infrastructure, network availability, maintenance, backups, support, and the fact that someone else is responsible for keeping the server connected when something fails.
Doing everything yourself is not always independence.
Sometimes it is simply accepting several additional jobs.
There is a certain symmetry in where the current site is hosted. The first full website was built through 1&1. After FrontPage, Flash, .NET Nuke, WordPress, and self-hosting experiments, the current site is once again with the same company.
1&1 is now IONOS.
So after twenty years of moving through different systems, the process has come back around.
But I am not returning with the same understanding I had in 2006.
Back then, the question was whether I could build a website.
Now I am asking whether it can be maintained, organized, expanded, backed up, and supported without every new article becoming another technical project.
Relearning WordPress
Returning to WordPress has required relearning it.
Some parts remain familiar: posts, pages, categories, themes, plugins, and media libraries. But the expectations surrounding a modern website are different.
A site has to function well on a phone.
Featured images matter because readers may encounter an article through an archive page, category listing, social preview, or mobile feed before they ever reach the full text.
Category structure matters because a growing collection of articles quickly becomes difficult to navigate.
Embedded media matters because video and livestreams are usually better hosted on platforms built to distribute them rather than on a standard website server.
Performance matters because readers are not going to wait indefinitely for an overloaded page to appear.
The software has changed, but so has the audience.
Readers expect recognizable article layouts, visual hooks, categories, previews, and enough consistency to understand the site without studying it first.
That is part of the relearning.
The Website as a Working Classroom
The current site is not only where articles are published. It is also where the skills are being rebuilt.
Every decision becomes part of that education:
how categories are organized, how banners are rotated, how featured images are assigned, how much media is stored locally, how larger projects are divided into series, and how the site is scheduled far enough ahead to keep production manageable.
A live project teaches differently than a tutorial.
A tutorial explains what a feature is supposed to do. A working site reveals what happens when that feature meets hundreds of real decisions.
The mistakes matter because they show where the process is weak.
The corrections matter because they can later be explained to someone else.
A Possible Pivot
That connects to a possible professional pivot.
Working in the gig economy does not mean every future skill has to remain inside the gig economy.
One direction may be helping other people create websites, organize content, and establish production systems for their businesses, projects, organizations, or personal interests.
That does not mean promising anyone that a website will become profitable.
Publishing is still a grind.
Building the site does not create an audience. Posting regularly does not guarantee attention. Good material does not guarantee discovery.
But profitability is not the only reason to build something.
A website can support a business, document a project, preserve a body of work, promote an organization, or give someone a place they control more directly than a social-media profile.
Those are still useful outcomes.
The Difference AI Makes
The largest difference between producing a website now and producing one twenty years ago is not WordPress.
It is the availability of AI as part of the production process.
AI does not create the experience, opinions, stories, or technical judgment behind the work. Those still have to come from somewhere.
What it changes is the ability to process rough material more consistently.
A dictated idea can become a structured draft.
A long conversation can be divided into sections.
Repeated points can be identified.
One oversized article can be recognized as three separate articles.
A rough explanation can be tested to see whether it actually says what the producer intended.
That matters when creating content at volume.
Work That Previously Had to Be Paid For
The support involved in publishing has always existed.
Editors read for clarity, structure, repetition, continuity, and tone. Researchers locate sources, verify claims, and identify missing context. Proofreaders catch errors the writer has stopped seeing. Production assistants organize schedules, formats, files, and the small steps required to turn unfinished material into something publishable.
These people were not unavailable.
They had to be paid.
For a newsroom, company, publisher, or established production operation, those costs may be part of the budget. For one person running an independent website, paying for research, editing, proofreading, and production assistance across every developing article may not be realistic.
Hiring someone for one major piece is one thing.
Paying for several production roles across a continuing stream of articles is another.
AI changes part of the economics of that first pass.
It can help organize material, identify duplication, question weak sections, and say:
No. This part does not work yet.
That does not make professional editors or researchers unnecessary.
A skilled editor brings judgment, accountability, experience, and an understanding of audience that an automated tool may not reproduce. A professional researcher can pursue sources and evaluate evidence far beyond a quick initial review.
AI provides partial assistance with work that would otherwise require additional labor.
The final responsibility still belongs to the person publishing the article.
The Reader Who Pushes Back
One of the biggest problems for an independent producer is being too close to the work.
You know what you intended to say, so you may unconsciously fill in missing transitions. You remember context that never made it onto the page. You may tolerate repetition because each repeated section arrived from a slightly different line of thought.
Another reader sees the gaps.
They notice where the argument loses direction, where the explanation assumes too much, or where one article has become several.
AI can serve as an initial reader with enough distance to challenge the structure.
It can still be wrong.
It can smooth away personality in the name of clarity. It can make strong language generic. It can misunderstand why a blunt or imperfect sentence was deliberately preserved.
That is why it remains a tool rather than the final authority.
The producer still decides what stays.
AI Did Not Create the Earlier Skills
This twenty-year progression matters because AI did not suddenly create the ability to build websites.
It did not teach the lessons from FrontPage, Flash, .NET Nuke, WordPress, or Home Server.
It did not create the judgment that says something may work technically while remaining a poor operational choice.
Those lessons came first.
AI becomes valuable because it can be combined with them.
Without experience, someone may accept whatever the tool produces.
With experience, the output can be directed, challenged, corrected, and rejected.
The older skills provide the standards.
The newer tool increases the capacity.
Producing More Coherently
The practical result is the ability to turn more ideas into usable drafts without every thought remaining trapped in notes, recordings, or unfinished documents.
A conversation can become an article.
An article can become a series.
A series can be organized into titles, sections, transitions, and a publishing order.
That does not make the process effortless.
There is still review. There is still verification. There is still trimming. There is still the decision to keep a sentence rough because polishing it further would remove the voice.
But the distance between having the thought and producing a coherent draft has become much smaller.
That is a genuine production change.
Coming Full Circle
The first website was hosted through 1&1.
The current website is hosted through IONOS.
Between those two points are twenty years of builders, animation tools, content-management systems, servers, workarounds, discontinued formats, and changing standards.
Now AI has entered the process as another tool.
Not as a replacement for the work that came before, but as a way to apply that accumulated experience more consistently.
The website is the visible result.
The articles are the continuing product.
But the deeper project is rebuilding a skill set that never entirely disappeared.
It had to be updated.
That is what relearning the work means.
You do not return to the beginning.
You return to the same kind of work with better questions, stronger judgment, more scars, and a larger collection of tools.