An Experiement on Building a Website

I think more people would have personal websites if it was easier to make them. Not just that either, I've been building websites for over 15 years and I still get stuck at the start of a new project pretty often.

Let's explore:

What are the obstacles for individuals to build a website?

From my personal experience, people hire me because making a website gets complicated fast. Sites are multi-media combinations of 3 coding languages (at least), HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And that's not going into the domain and hosting skills needed. Several services attempt to lower this barrier to entry. And now with AI, the barriers are coming lower every day.

Let's take a look at what options people have available today.

Current Options

I think there are more options available than ever to get a personal site online:

However, for this experiment I'm going to test 2 that I really believe in:

I chose these because they are on the complete opposite sides of the world in terms of tech but conceptually result in the same outcome. A publicly visible personal website. You might know that websites can be discovered in many different ways. I also want to test which of these 2 options results in better performance.

Proposed Solutions

I'm going to use this site as a baseline. And I'm going to use a brand new lovable account as the variable. The process is simple, ask Lovable to create a personal website (like this one) and post to it every day. As far as instructions, I'm going to keep them as basic as possible. "Make me a website", "Make sure its optimized for SEO", "make the logo bigger"; you know, the cringe requests I get from clients every day. Then, just sit back and let it do it's thing.

I'm going to track and measure both sites, since they're both brand spankin' new, and see how they are performing relative to the effort I've put into them.

Notes

Speaking of effort, here's what I've done for this pure html site:

Pros

Cons