I built out this website using AI-generated HTML code inserted into GitHub, and I hosted it on Cloudflare. No frameworks or paid tools needed.
Only real cost (other than my time) was the $10 annual fee that I paid to Cloudflare to purchase this domain name (colinpedron.com). That’ll renew automatically each year for the rest of time, or at least until my credit card stops working.
I used ChatGPT 5.2 for all aspects of setup for this site. The main design constraint was maintenance. I wanted something I could update quickly without creating future work.
There were a few gotchas (GitHub Pages paths, Cloudflare caching), but those were mechanical issues, not architectural ones. Easy fixes once identified. I took lots of little pauses along the way to ask the AI model to explain further. Typically this consisted of me sending screenshots of error messages or (more commonly) asking it to rewind back to earlier instructions to remove coder jargon and just explain what I needed to do in plain english.
This type of website setup is predictable, cheap to run, and perhaps a little boring for those with more coding experience. As somebody with just a little coding experience but a whole lot of AI experience, I’ll take the simplistic back-end design any day, because I know that the AI model can guide me through any wierd issues that might crop up while still making the actual site itself appear professional. That being said, the simplicity itself prevents many issues from emerging in the first place, which is nice.
If you’re building a personal site, resist the urge to overbuild it. Start with the minimum system that does the job and stays out of your way. And definitely don’t pay for fancy templates that you don’t need.
I’ll expand one step further to close out my inaugural post (and yeah, this’ll probably become a theme in this blog): It’s 2026. Just use AI for any and all digital work. If that idea in your head will exist on a computer, then AI (+ a bit of time and elbow grease on your part) can probably build it better and cheaper than whatever alternative method/platform you’re imagining.
More to come as the new models continue to rain down.