When I pivoted back into tech 4 years ago, I needed a portfolio fast. I was finishing a bootcamp, hunting for a job, and frankly, I just needed something "live."
I chose WordPress for a specific reason: Fear of Lock-in.
I was loathe to sign up for Wix or Squarespace. I didn't want to build my digital identity in a walled garden where I couldn't access the source code. If they close down or jack up the prices, how do you "port" your site out of a proprietary builder? You can't.
With WordPress, I at least knew I could (technically) move that unwieldy mess of PHP and Elementor to another host. But the trade-off was painful. It felt like "nickel-and-dime" architecture—every basic feature required another paid plugin. The code was bloated, the site was heavy, and I felt like a mechanic constantly fixing an old car rather than a designer driving a new one.
Enter the AI Workflow.
I started by testing this hypothesis on myself. Over the last few months, I worked in my spare time to build my "Portfolio 2.0," completely ditching the old CMS for pure, static HTML. It was a liberation. (If you’ve been following my recent posts on LinkedIn, you’ve seen the real-time process of me reclaiming my design independence).
Once I felt the absolute control I had over my own code, and saw how fast and easy creation and deployment was, a light bulb went off: I can do this for my clients, too.
Last weekend, I migrated a client’s website (bragaphd.com) from a paid WordPress hosting plan to a static Netlify deployment.
The Stats: ⏱️ Time: 7 hours total. 🛠️ Tools: Cursor (AI), Figma (Assets), Netlify (Hosting). 💰 Cost: $0 hosting fees.
I didn't use a migration plugin. I simply took screenshots of the existing site, fed them to Cursor, and said: "Rebuild this in clean, semantic HTML."
The AI did the heavy lifting on the syntax, allowing me to focus on the "Design Engineering":
- I exported high-res assets directly from the source.
- I stripped away the bloat.
- I manually implemented a robust SEO strategy (Open Graph tags, favicons, meta descriptions) that plugins used to charge me for.
- I even improved the responsive behavior.
The result is a site that looks identical to the old one but loads instantly and costs nothing to host.
I finally feel independent. No database to hack, no plugins to update, no platform lock-in. Just pure, static code that I own completely.
#DesignEngineering #WebDev #AI #Cursor #Netlify #WordPress #UXDesign #StaticSite