This whole thing started as a WordPress site. I set it up locally, mostly to mess around with layouts and see what works. Pretty standard stuff – pick a theme, customize it a bit, see how it feels. But here's the thing: WordPress was absolute overkill for what I needed. I just wanted a simple place to write about my BeamNG mods, not run an entire content management system.

Stripping It Down

When I exported the WordPress site, it was packed with unnecessary stuff. Think emoji loaders, admin bar code, theme customizers – all that WordPress baggage that makes sense for a dynamic site but becomes dead weight when you're going static. I needed to clean this up.

Getting Help from AI

I used Claude to help me pick through the WordPress output and turn it into something cleaner. The interesting part wasn't just cleaning up code – it was figuring out how to keep the good parts of WordPress (like the blog structure) without dragging along all the database and PHP stuff.

Building It Back Up

The file structure we ended up with is pretty straightforward:

root/
├── index.html
├── styles.css
├── js/
│   ├── posts-index.js
│   ├── post-loader.js
│   └── image-handler.js
└── posts/
    └── index.html

Making Posts Work

Instead of a database, I'm using a simple JavaScript file that keeps track of all posts. Another script handles displaying them – three on the home page, all of them in the posts section. It's not fancy, but it works, and it's way simpler than dealing with MySQL.

What Changed

Compared to the WordPress version, this site is:

  • Way faster (no PHP or database queries)
  • Easier to update (just edit some HTML)
  • More secure (can't hack what isn't there)
  • Perfect for what I actually need

Conclusions

Would I suggest this to anyone that wants to make a website? No. Would I tell anyone that using (premium!) AI chatbot is better than actually learning to code yourself? Also no. Here's why:

First, this whole process only worked because I already knew what I was doing. I could tell when Claude was suggesting something that wouldn't work, when its code needed tweaking, and when to ignore its suggestions entirely. Using AI without that background knowledge is like trying to build a car by asking someone who's only seen pictures of cars – you might end up with something car-shaped, but good luck getting it to run.

Second, the AI is just a tool. A pretty smart one, sure, but it's not magic. It helped me convert WordPress templates to static HTML faster than doing it manually, but it couldn't make the important decisions about structure, functionality, or user experience. Those came from understanding what makes a good website good.

What I did here worked for my specific case: converting a simple WordPress site to an even simpler static one. If you're looking to learn web development, start with the basics. Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript properly. Understand how websites work. Then maybe use AI as a coding buddy, not as a replacement for actually knowing your stuff.