This website was created primarily as a learning experience and personal project. The last website I co-created and maintained was over 20 years ago for my wife and her friends’ sewing and quilting classes, including early credit card payment integration. In early 2006, I also built and operated my own QuickBooks-based business system for selling products and services. Later I integrated secure invoice payments through Square (est. 2009) in early 2021 for accepting payments both locally and remotely.
A few things have changed since 2005.
AI certainly helped with this project, but not in the way many people assume. AI is a powerful tool, but it does not simply “build everything for you” unless you are willing to spend heavily and fully rely on generated solutions without understanding them. I started this project using a lower-cost ChatGPT plan, which still provided enough continuity to remember ongoing work sessions and continue complex projects over time.
One thing I learned quickly is that AI can just as easily lead a project off course if you blindly follow every suggestion. It became my responsibility to learn enough modern Web Development — especially WordPress, PHP, CSS, caching behavior, and plugin interactions — to recognize when solutions were drifting away from my original design goals or creating unnecessary complexity.
Most of my prior programming experience was in VB/VBA, database systems, structured logic, automation, and business software development rather than modern PHP scripting or frontend web design. That background helped tremendously in understanding workflows, troubleshooting problems, and organizing the project into manageable pieces.
Without AI assistance, I probably would have abandoned the project long ago. At the same time, without prior technical experience, persistence, testing, and a willingness to learn, AI alone would not have been enough to complete it successfully.
What surprised me most is how much work goes into even a relatively small modern website. Between hosting environments, caching systems, security, member workflows, plugins, custom logic, and ongoing maintenance, there are many more moving parts than there were twenty years ago.
That said, I am happy to finally have the site operating in a stable maintenance phase — and even happier that I kept going long enough to finish it properly.