What is The Best Website Builder For WordPress In 2026?
What is the best website builder for WordPress in 2026? Find out which builder offers the most straightforward setup and most powerful features.
With Special Guest James Welbes
@JamesWelbes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jameswelbes/
This Week’s Sponsors
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Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. This is episode 990. Got a great show here. We’ll be evaluating the best WordPress website builder at the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026. We got an expert on the show who does the tutorials on some of these page builders. I see him as a monster, a monster-gánster, as we would say in London. A bit of London slang there. We got James Wellbis. How do you pronounce your second name?
[00:00:58.640] – James Welbes
Welbes.
[00:00:59.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Wellbis. James Webbes. So James, it should be a great show with James. So, James, can you give us a quick 10-15-second intro? Then, when we move into the central part of the show, we’ll go into your background in a little more detail.
[00:01:18.440] – James Welbes
Sure, yeah. I build websites exclusively with WordPress. I have been using WordPress for a long time. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, how long it’s been since I last used WordPress. And I’ve recently started using a new website builder. Traditionally, I’ve been using Themify, which is a typical Elementor divvy-type alternative page builder experience. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been diving into a new page builder and a new CSS framework and learning a lot, but it’s still WordPress.
[00:01:58.680] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. And I’ve got my great co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers to the tribe?
[00:02:07.440] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Manana Nomas, and I work directly with the great team over at WP Tonic.
[00:02:16.580] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. Before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve also got some great special offers from the sponsors of the show, plus a created list of the best WordPress plugins and services really aimed at the WordPress professional. You can get all these free resources by visiting wp-tonic. com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals, and you find all the free. What more could my WordPress professionals ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. I’ve made a career of disappointment, but there we go. James, let’s proceed directly to the interrogation. I’ve got my tools of trade in front of me. If you resist, I will utilize the more advanced tools on you. There we go. I’ve only got No kidding. Can you delve in? How did you initially get into the world of web design and development? What led to this journey, James?
[00:03:43.760] – James Welbes
When I was about 12, I had a friend who would build websites, and I didn’t understand how that was possible. I just assumed that he was some genius savant. And I kept bugging him to teach me how to do it. And finally, he was like, just right click on a website and click View Source and figure it out. Because back then, you can do that. The code nowadays, if you do that, there’s a lot going on in there. But back in the day, websites were a lot more simple. So you really could just right click on a website, click View Source, and teach yourself how HTML works. And so I did that. That That was my first introduction to web development. I built my very first website. It was a Dragon Ball Z fan page, and it’s still live to this day on Angelfire, which is crazy that that still exists. But I never really took it seriously. It was just a thing that I did for fun and didn’t even learn CSS. It was literally just HTML. I didn’t learn CSS until later in my probably my late 20s. I finally was like, all right, if I’m going to take this seriously, I should probably learn CSS.
[00:05:04.460] – James Welbes
And then eventually heard about WordPress. I tried it out. Absolutely hated it. I didn’t understand it. Coming from a background of if you want a How did you create an HTML file. That’s just how websites work. And then I tried WordPress and I created a page in WordPress, and then I started poking around the files trying to figure out where that HTML file was and couldn’t find it, of course, because that’s not how WordPress works. So it just confused me, and I hated it, and I thought, I’m never going to use this. I don’t know why anybody uses it. Didn’t understand the concept of a database or a dynamic website at all. And I was like, you know what? People keep talking about this WordPress thing, and so it’s got to be me. I finally decided. I was like, it’s got to be me. The reason that this isn’t working, it’s not WordPress because everybody else seems to love So I just stuck with it and I slowly learned how it worked. And I slowly figured out this whole PHP dynamic website database thing, the template system, all that stuff. I still hated it because I didn’t understand why I would install a theme and then I would go look at my website and it would look nothing like the demo from the website where I got the theme from.
[00:06:24.300] – James Welbes
I didn’t understand that there’s still a lot of work involved in making your website actually look The way you want. So it was a slow process. And in the beginning, I hated it, and I told people it was dumb. But obviously, I came around in the end. It was all ignorance. It was why I hated WordPress. I just didn’t understand how it worked. And the more I learned about WordPress, the more I came to actually like it. And eventually, it’s all I use. I don’t build websites from scratch using React or anything like that. If When you build a website, it’s going to be in WordPress.
[00:07:04.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Yes, fantastic. All right, let’s move it over to Kirt. Kirt, over to you.
[00:07:13.600] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, it’s interesting because I’m as old as dirt as well, and I started around 2000 playing on the internet, making product, making websites. I went the Dreamweaver path, HTML Dreamweaver. And Macromedia to 2004, I think was the software that I latched on to and bought.
[00:07:37.100] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ve got a worse confession, Kirk. I was a flash developer.
[00:07:41.300] – Kurt von Ahnen
I had flash, too. I thought flash was amazing. And I had this really cool website. It would do all these cool things when you hit the link. And it’s not like that anymore to your point, James. Things are different. And when WordPress came out, I was horribly confused. But then I was like, there’s got to be something to it because things just seem to fall in place. And so over time, as things evolved and changed, I went the same direction. But then I got lost in the page builder space. And so I still remember what was it? Omnibuilder, something like that, it was that. Origin blocks. I remember origin blocks and things like that. And so if we think about all of that evolution, where would you Where are we at now connected to WordPress page builders here in 2025?
[00:08:37.580] – James Welbes
Where are we at in 2025 with page builders? Man, page builders, first of all, there’s a lot of them. We’re at a point where there’s definitely no shortage of page builders. You can get a little bit overwhelmed trying to decide which one to use. And to be fair, I think, and I’m going to be honest, I don’t have a ton of experience with all these page builders, but it’s one of those things where if that’s the experience you’re looking for, it almost doesn’t matter which one to use. You can build a business using Elementor, you can build a business using Divi, you can build a business using Themify. There might be certain things that these people will Maybe they prefer about Elementor, and other people say, well, I prefer this about Divi, but for the most part, they’re all the same thing. They’re drag and drop builders. They’re using style panels. They’re competing with each other. So if Elementor has a feature that Divi doesn’t, Chances are Divi is going to probably have it pretty soon and vice versa. And it wasn’t always like that. In the beginning, I remember there’s a builder that came out, I think it was called Seven or the Seven or something like that.
[00:09:56.900] – James Welbes
That was one of the first ones I remember as being impressive visual builder. And I feel like I even saw Divi before I ever saw Elementor, even though Elementor is the king now. I don’t know if it’s true that Divi came out first or if that was just my personal experience, So we’re just at a time where it’s like, man, we went from pretty quickly, we went from no page builders to so many different page builders. And it’s actually frustrating if you’re going to be in this space and you get a new client and you’re managing a bunch of different websites and every single one of them has a completely different builder. It can be a little frustrating to have all those different options for sure.
[00:10:46.160] – Kurt von Ahnen
For me, with the Elementor space, because it took me a while to adopt it, and then it seemed like I used it as a crutch really badly. I was like, I can do everything in Elementor. And so I was doing that. And then I running into issues with customers because they would think, oh, I’m just going to go in and change this heading real quick, or I’m just going to change this. And then they would open up the WordPress editor. They’d make a change, save it. And then, of course, all the formatting would disappear, and I’d get the emergency emails about how our hosting was broken or we broke their website. And I was like, well, let me guess. You changed something, and then you didn’t do it in Elementor, right? And so then you end up having to teach people the Elementor side of things. And And that’s where I really began to sense a little bit of stress as an agency owner, because it was like, I want to build the product, but I don’t want to and I don’t mind teaching people, but I’m not getting compensated to teach people. And so I leaned away from the element or space and then got into more of the ASTRA and the cadence as they increased Spectra and Cadence Pro and Cadence blocks and things.
[00:11:57.540] – Kurt von Ahnen
But then again, I started looking at other page builder options. And then I think, to your point, there’s just so many choices. There’s Ollie, there’s Generate Press, there’s Cadence, ASTRA, Elementor, Divi. And they all seem to have their own little cults, too.
[00:12:16.880] – James Welbes
That’s true. And there’s two cults. There’s the block editor cult, and then there’s the anti-block editor cult. So you have themes like Ollie and Cadence, which are block themes. And they’re basically libraries of a bunch of custom blocks. And then you have Divi, Elementor. Those are absolutely the opposite. They don’t use the block. You can’t even use the block editor, which is frustrating if you install a plugin, let’s say, some form plugin, and they have a block, where you drop a block on your page and that adds a form to the page. Well, you can’t use that if you’re using elementor divi, because you can’t add blocks. You can only add an Elementor module or you can only add a divi module. So if they don’t have a short code, you’re screwed and you have to use different plugin. So there’s definitely pros and cons to both. And there’s two completely separate camps. If you like the block editor, you’re not going to want to use Elementor. You’re going to want to look at Cadence or you’re going to want to look at Ollie. But if you hate the block editor, you’re not going to even consider Cadence or Ollie because those are just block editor themes.
[00:13:26.600] – James Welbes
So there’s definitely two camps there. And the word cult, I think, is appropriate because there’s some people that are just really passionate about certain things. And you mentioned Twitter earlier, Jonathan. Twitter has… It’s It’s been fun. There’s been a lot of fun conversations on Twitter between these two camps.
[00:13:49.960] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s one way of putting it. Well, there’s a boundary. There’s all this boundary, and some people regularly step over that boundary, in my opinion. But what would I know, James? So let’s have a bit of a fun game. Hopefully, James, you can stay on a bit for some bonus content. We normally wrap up the podcast after hour. Kirk has to go on the hour, but hopefully you can stay on for a little while. Do you think you’ll be able to stay on? Yeah, I think so. We delve in. But in the podcast part of the show, let’s have a little game, James. I love my games, James. I’m going to go through it. I’ve added Divi because I forgot Divi. Bless their hearts. I’ve added Divi to the list which I gave to James before this interview. We got a list of not all the page builders. We would be here for about four hours, but what I see is some of the leaders. I’m going to name name it, James, and I just want a one sentence, what comes in your mind when I mention the page builder. Then in the bonus content, we can go into a bit more detail about each one.
[00:15:16.060] – Jonathan Denwood
But are you ready for the game, James?
[00:15:19.740] – James Welbes
I suppose I should preface this by saying I don’t have a ton of experience with some of these builders, but I can still form opinions about them.
[00:15:28.160] – Jonathan Denwood
I think most of the people don’t, but it doesn’t stop them from commenting on Twitter, does it? It never stops anybody, the WordPress space, to have an opinion, even if they don’t know anything what they’re talking about. They never stopped anybody on Twitter, did it? So let’s start the game. If I say Elementor, what comes in your mind, James?
[00:15:54.620] – James Welbes
Oh, man, a big steaming pile of garbage, mostly. I’ve never liked Elementor, and I can’t tell you if it’s because I genuinely just don’t like it or if it’s because I used Themify for so many years, and I’m just so used to Themify and how it works. But every time I’ve had to log into an Elementor website for a client, it’s just been a headache. I don’t like the UI. I don’t know what it is about it. I just hate it. I hate working in it. I also don’t like what Kurt mentioned, how you can’t… If you click Edit, you edit the page in the page builder, but that’s not where you’re supposed to edit. You got to click Edit with Elementor and you can break stuff. I don’t like it at all. I also don’t like that they don’t… I don’t like the whole philosophy of that type of builder.
[00:16:44.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, yeah, let’s move on. What comes into your mind when I say, Generate press?
[00:16:53.160] – James Welbes
Nothing, because I’ve never used it, I’ve never looked at it, I’ve never logged into a website that had that installed on it, which is surprising because I know it’s popular.
[00:17:04.220] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, let’s fall back on the backup. Let’s ask Kirk then. Kirk is going to be the backup. Say, Kirk, what do you think? Would I say, Generate press?
[00:17:14.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
I think it’s a fine page builder. You can get the end result you want, and they have a ton of starter templates, like first drafts for people to get started with content, because I know a lot of people struggle with the blank page.
[00:17:30.000] – Jonathan Denwood
All right, let’s move on. If I say to you, James, be the builder, what comes into your mind, James?
[00:17:39.740] – James Welbes
Also very little. It’s been so long. I had a friend who used to build websites in Beaver Builder, and he seemed to like it. But again, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually used it before. I’m sure there’s been one or two times back in the day where I’ve had to use it, but I really have nothing, no thoughts on that one as well.
[00:18:04.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think so that wasn’t really a fantastic answer, James, but we’re going to let you get away with that. We’re going to ask my co-host, because you I was shocked when he when he deserted me, James, and he found another co-host. You got another podcast with another great co-host, haven’t you? Yeah. They use Beaver Builder For all their projects, don’t they?
[00:18:32.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Tobi over at the Mighty Mo, he uses Beaver Builder pretty much exclusively. And, Robbie and the team, they’re great people. I love the Beaver Builder team. However, when- You’re not a fan.
[00:18:45.110] – Jonathan Denwood
When are you?
[00:18:45.630] – Kurt von Ahnen
Not a fan of using the actual builder itself. I just I found it cumbersome. And, oh, way back, Lifter LMS used to be in Beaver Builder. So we used to have to make edits on that. So yeah, it’s just not as clear-cut and concise of a process to me as I would like it to be.
[00:19:11.840] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s move on. Cadence WP. What do you reckon of that one, James?
[00:19:20.020] – James Welbes
If somebody is holding a gun to your head and saying you have to use the block editor, then I would say you should probably look into Cadence. I don’t like the block editor, but I used to work for the company that owns Cadence, and so I’ve used it.
[00:19:36.400] – Jonathan Denwood
I know you do, Ben. What was it like? Did you work with Ben at all directly?
[00:19:41.900] – James Welbes
Not really. I worked on the I did Ben’s calendar at first, and then I worked on Restrict Content Pro. I actually helped launch orderable for a little bit, and I worked on member-dash and learn-dash. I know who Ben is, but I didn’t really work with him.
[00:20:03.860] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, great developer. I think Generate Press or Cadence WP are, to me, a couple of the premier Gutenberg-based technologies, but Ollie’s pretty good as well. Let’s move on to something you probably have got something to say about James. Let’s look at bricks. If I said bricks to you, what you got to say about that?
[00:20:34.400] – James Welbes
‘brix? I was looking into bricks and I bought a license for it before Edge came out.
[00:20:44.200] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you have to swear?
[00:20:46.880] – James Welbes
Do I have to swear?
[00:20:49.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Sorry, not yet. I know British people love to swear. Oh, yeah. Would When I have a session, Kirk will say, I don’t normally, but when I have a session, I really do have a session, don’t I, Kirk?
[00:21:07.060] – James Welbes
When I worked at Steller, my boss for a long time was Jack. He’s from England and he was an interesting character. He knew a swear word or two. But where was I going? Bricks. Bricks is an interesting builder because I wouldn’t lump it with the block editor, of course. It’s not a block theme like Cadence or Ollie, but it’s also not like Elementor or Divi. It’s one of those builders, and there’s a few other builders that are similar to it. I think Oxygen and Breakdance are similar, where it’s It’s very much style panel driven. So you have just a panel of all sorts of styles that you’d want to mess with. And that’s basically how you build your site. It’s like a very web flowy type experience. And I was probably going to switch to bricks. I built one simple website with it. And coming from Themify, I liked it. I liked that it used the language of web development versus making stuff up like Elementor and Divi and Gutenberg. So it’s a pretty solid builder. As you probably already know, though, I’ve moved on to a different builder, I much prefer, but not counting that builder that I’m using now.
[00:22:35.460] – James Welbes
I mostly have positive things to say about Breaks, I think. I didn’t use it a ton, but when I did use it, I was pretty impressed with it.
[00:22:43.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, Tom is in his crowd seeing really great people. I think it’s built not in React. I think they use Vue to actually build the product, but I might be wrong there. So let’s move on. What If I say OllieWP, what would you say?
[00:23:05.280] – James Welbes
Similar to Cadence, I tried to build a site with Ollie. I made a YouTube video about it, and there’s a few things that I like about it. To me, and I don’t want to… I’m not trying to be rude, but to me, it mostly just felt like it was a big pattern library. They had a few little features with for the theme. But for the most part, it felt like when I was using Ollie, I basically was just using Gutenberg with a big old library of a whole bunch of predesign patterns. And so that’s just not for me. Again, if you’re using the block editor and you like the block editor, then I think it’s probably a really good option. And the cool thing is you can use some of these things together. You could use Cadence. Cadence has a plugin that’s just a bunch of custom blocks they’ve You could use that and you could use Ollie, or you could use patterns from Ollie and use the Cadence theme. So that’s one of the pros, I would say, maybe to the block editor is that anybody who’s created a library of patterns or custom blocks, You can use all of them.
[00:24:16.260] – James Welbes
You don’t have to just pick one and stick with it. But it wasn’t really for me. It’s not building a website from patterns and then having to just redesign every single pattern to match the design that I’m actually going for. It’s not really my my preferred workflow. I do like they had a new feature for animations. I want to call that Ollie Pro. They just released a feature a month or two ago that lets you very easily add animations to your page. So I thought I I played around with that and I thought that was pretty impressive. I think their new CSS class manager is pretty well done.
[00:24:55.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Right, Theo. Bright Dance. What do you got to say about breakdance?
[00:25:03.700] – James Welbes
I’ve never used it. I’ve looked at it. It seems to be pretty similar to a bricks type thing. Just a very style panel-driven, uses the language I’ve designed, so I like that. I’ve never used it, but I think if I was forced to use it, I wouldn’t want to jump off a bridge.
[00:25:25.100] – Jonathan Denwood
All right. It seems very popular, doesn’t it? I don’t know much about it. I So, Kirk, have you looked at it? I think you’ve looked at it a bit, haven’t you?
[00:25:34.560] – Kurt von Ahnen
We’ve covered it on the Membership Machine show a couple of times and did an overview purpose evaluation of it. But it doesn’t pop off as one of my favorites.
[00:25:48.040] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s used by… I am going to look at it a little bit, but there you go. One I’ve added, I added to the last minute because I should have done divvy. So what What’s your views on Divi, James?
[00:26:03.140] – James Welbes
Pretty much the same view that I had about Elementor. I don’t like it.
[00:26:08.640] – Jonathan Denwood
But which Divi are we talking about? Are we talking about Divi Classic or are we talking about Divi 5?
[00:26:15.080] – James Welbes
Yeah, I haven’t used Divi 5, so I can’t really speak to that. But Divi Classic, I don’t like it. I recently had a client who was on Divi, and I immediately moved them off of Divi. I moved them to a builder that wasn’t even fully released yet. That’s how much I did not like working in Divi.
[00:26:38.260] – Jonathan Denwood
No, they’re fantastic people. But when I was actually taking clients directly, any divvy project, it always ended up in a bit of a nightmare for me. But there’s a whole host of people. They just love it, don’t they, James?
[00:26:57.160] – James Welbes
They do. It was one of the first of these visual drag and drop builders.
[00:27:03.040] – Jonathan Denwood
It certainly was. Let’s finish with Etch. If I said Etch to you, what would you say back to me, James?
[00:27:13.420] – James Welbes
Never heard of it. What is that?
[00:27:15.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, exactly. What is it?
[00:27:18.860] – James Welbes
Etch is, I like to call it- You’re getting in the right frame of mind now, James.
[00:27:24.090] – Jonathan Denwood
You’re understanding the show.
[00:27:26.840] – James Welbes
Good. Sarcasm is my first language.
[00:27:30.000] – Jonathan Denwood
Unfortunately, the founder of Etch doesn’t understand my humor, really. He doesn’t appreciate it, James. That’s okay. There we go.
[00:27:39.660] – James Welbes
Yeah, I like to call Etch the dream weaver of WordPress. I mentioned that bricks was different. It deviated from the normal either block builder or this drag and drop page builder. Etch is even more different. Went one step further away from both of those camps. It is a builder. There are visual aspects to it. For instance, when I want to add a section to the page, I click the button for section. So there’s that page builder aspect to it. But at the same time, you always have access to the code. So when you click that section button, literally all it’s doing is adding an HTML section tag to your project, which you can see in the HTML panel, and you can edit that in the HTML panel. If you change your mind and you want that to be a div instead of a section, you could just delete the word section, type the word div. So you have this just very, very different development environment that you’ve really never seen in WordPress before that allows you to just have a lot more control over the output of the website. As you know, one of the things people complain about with Elementor and Divi is when you go look at the code on the front-end, there’s so much stuff in there.
[00:28:59.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Elementor, divinitis, as I call it, never.
[00:29:03.320] – James Welbes
Exactly. And Gutenberg does it, too. I was just building a very simple plugin yesterday that the plugin adds a button to the front-end. I went and I looked in the front-end, and they wrapped that button in a div, and I had AI build the block, and that was just the default process. I told the AI, Hey, take that extra div out. I don’t need that. I just want a button. And it did it. So it is possible to build a block properly. Gutenberg just chooses not to. But that stuff that people complain about with Elementor and Divi, you don’t have that when you build a website with the tool like Edge, because literally the only stuff that shows up on the front-end is what you put in. If you add a link, that’s all that you get. If you add a section, that’s all that you get. I really appreciate that aspect. That’s just one of many things.
[00:29:49.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you say that Bricks doesn’t do that?
[00:29:52.200] – James Welbes
I don’t know. I think Bricks is a lot better about that than the other builders. Like I said, I only built one website with Bricks, and I do think that they are pretty good about not adding a bunch of extra divs and things like that. I don’t know about things like breakdance and oxygen if they do similar stuff. I just know for sure Elementor, Divi, and Gutenberg are pretty bad at this.
[00:30:17.240] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. All right. That was our little element of the show there. I think James dealt with the madness really great. We’re going to go for our mid-break, and we will be back with some other questions with James. We’ve got a very noisy keyboard as well. That’s a massively noisy keyboard, James. We will be back in a few moments. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a dive in all the leading page builders, but we left out at least 20 of them. Maybe that’s one of the problems of building a website in WordPress. In the end of 2025, there is so much choice. But it was a great show. But before we go into the meat potatoes, I like to say that we’ve also got another great show called the Membership Machine Show. If you want to learn about all the best technology to build a membership or community website as a power user or a user, a freelancer, go and search for the Membership Machine Show. It’s a great show. It’s done by me and Kirk as well, and it’s a bit of a laugh. We delve into the world of WordPress and membership.
[00:31:45.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Should find it interesting, folks. Over to you, Kirk, for the next question.
[00:31:51.200] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I just want to touch on that list of page builders again, too, because I think I’m in a very a similar camp to James. I wanted to get to this question, and I want to ask it as delicately as possible, and I’ll share with you. I tried to adopt Bricks, right? So I adopted Bricks before Edge was released. Edge was released. I was super excited. I fell for it. The guy got all my money, like early adopter. Boom. I’ll pay, I’m in. And I’m just going to be honest with you, man, from an adoption standpoint, it’s just a completely different experience for me. I’m so busy with the other facets of running my agency that I, partly my fault, I just haven’t had enough time to put into adopting this Edge platform. I’m finding the learning curve to be immense. Did you find that as well, or was it more adoptable for you with your developer background?
[00:32:54.860] – James Welbes
There was a little bit of that with me, but I didn’t jump in on Edge quite that early. I didn’t know anything about Kevin or his products before Edge. So I wasn’t one of those guys who is loving automatic CSS and frames. And so there’s a lot of people like that who gave Kevin money before they wrote a single line of code for Edge. I was not one of those people. I waited until I saw videos, until I actually saw Kevin using Edge in some of his live streams. So before I bought it, I had already seen him use it a little bit. And so that definitely helped because it really is like it’s like if you haven’t built a lot of websites or maybe you’ve poked around HTML CSS a little bit and then somebody plopped you down in front of Dreamweaver and said, build a website. It’s like, yeah, you’d be lost there, too. Or if you never used a page builder before and somebody sat you down in front of Elementor and said, build a website, you’d be just as lost. So There definitely is a bit of a learning curve with Edge because it’s completely different.
[00:34:05.480] – James Welbes
It’s the first WordPress builder like it. And so if you haven’t watched some videos to see somebody else using it, I imagine you would be pretty lost. And there’s been some discussion about that internally as well, about onboarding and things like that. How would you go about properly onboarding folks? For me, just watching Kevin use it is the best onboarding experience. Just watch his livestream, go back and… They’re all public on his YouTube, so you can go back and watch them. Just watch him use it and then go in and start playing around. And your biggest barrier will be your knowledge of CSS. And that’s something that you can just easily get better at.
[00:34:44.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Yeah, but it was like for me, it was like there was the promise of, if you’re an Elementor user, we have this style panel you’re going to be able to use. And I was like, oh, that’s a guy like me. And then his style panel doesn’t have any of the starter elements that What other page builders have. It has the field, right? But it’s like, if you don’t know what to put in that field, nothing’s going to happen on the page. Whereas with Elementor, you can click around and things start to happen. You go, oh, now I get it. So you got to know stuff before you can do stuff. You don’t learn by experimentation, I don’t think. I think you have to know it to do it.
[00:35:20.660] – James Welbes
Yeah. One of the problems with Elementor is you can style something without adding a class to it, which is just poor web And poor web development practice. And so like with Edge, if you drop a section on the page and then you click on that section, you will see no styling options. You can’t do anything to it. You have to add a class. Once you add a class, then you get all the options. And it’s similar to Webflow. If you want to adjust the border radius, you find borders and you click on radius. But yeah, so that can be a little jarring for some people when they add something to the page and they can’t style and they’re wondering why they can’t style it. It’s because you got to add a class to it first for sure. And you may have heard, they’re getting rid of the style panel. I heard. If you like the style panel, sorry, All right. But to be fair, they are replacing it with something that’s much better and faster and easier to use. They’re calling it the mini GUI, because what it is, it’s GUI, it’s a graphical interface, right?
[00:36:30.000] – James Welbes
It’s actually inside the CSS panel. And so all the basic things you would normally do, like you want to give it display flex or a line item center or whatever. If you happen to be looking at a paragraph, it will give you text options, like font size, color, all that stuff. So it’s basically like a style panel, but it’s much more convenient. You’re not going from here to there and clicking and going to all these different areas. It’s just right there while you’re doing the CSS, you can either just type the CSS or you can click a button if you want to. And so in my opinion, it’s the best of both worlds. For people that like to click stuff or people that like to type stuff, the truth is there are times where you want to type and there are times where you want to click. And so I think this mini GUI is a perfect combination of those two philosophies.
[00:37:22.220] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, the more I use it, the more I’m starting to type. So I guess it’s rubbing off on.
[00:37:26.560] – James Welbes
Yeah, because you realize it’s actually faster than clicking all around and going and trying to find, oh, where is this? Is it under layout? Is it under type? It’s actually faster to just type, oh, I want a border radius, border radius, 10 pixels, move on.
[00:37:40.380] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. Well, that takes us to our next question. And that was- Can I add something to it before we go into it?
[00:37:47.580] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. It’s only a fault in my mind, James, but do you think… Because in your background, it’s a little bit like my background, you got introduced into the world of WordPress before Alimator really hit the WordPress space at the same time as Beaver Builder, and I’m sure there was other page builders. But Alimator with Beaver Builder really changed the market. I’ve seen people who entered the world of web design But I say that you also had Divi as well, didn’t you? They’re the three. Probably Divi was the first, but I think it was Alimator and Beaver Builder that really shook the market. But you see a whole host of people that all they know is Alimate or all they know is Beaver Builder. What you outlined with Etch and with HTML5, and sections and really optimize code and remove divvitus. A lot of people in the world of divvle wouldn’t even know what we meant by divvleitis. So Do you think that is a major dividing line amongst people that are making websites? Do you think I’ve got that wrong, James?
[00:39:28.120] – James Welbes
Oh, no, there’s for sure a dividing line There’s the whole no code, low code philosophy, which is element or divvy, all that stuff. And there’s a huge dividing line between these two types of builders, and they It’s getting worse, isn’t it?
[00:39:46.460] – Jonathan Denwood
When you add AI and lovable and fint systems like that, isn’t it? It’s actually getting worse. Is worse the right word?
[00:39:57.400] – James Welbes
It’s getting more interesting, and there are a lot more discussions because more people are able to jump in. Yeah. And AI is basically, depending on what you’re doing, AI would probably be considered a no code, low code solution because you, yourself don’t need to know code to use it, even though the result is obviously code. So yeah, there’s a lot of… But that’s almost a third camp because there’s people who are all in on things like Elementor and Divi who are anti-AI. So it’s not like the AI crowd just gets to jump in and be part of this low code, no code camp. There’s three camps now with a little bit of overlap maybe here and there. So, yeah, it’s definitely very interesting. A lot of good conversations on Twitter about it for sure.
[00:40:49.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, over to you, Kurt. I just thought, okay, thank you.
[00:40:53.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
No. Well, the next question, and to me, it’s an extension of our conversation here, but For you yourself, what do you see as the biggest challenges that WordPress is looking at for the next year, year and a half?
[00:41:10.200] – James Welbes
Besides their leader, they have some challenges coming.
[00:41:17.110] – Jonathan Denwood
First of all-Well, that was Kevin.
[00:41:20.400] – James Welbes
Kevin?
[00:41:21.040] – Jonathan Denwood
I thought Kevin was the leader of WordPress. No.
[00:41:24.300] – James Welbes
For some people he is. They have some challenges. One of them is, I think, complacency. I think that any time you criticize WordPress, the cult will jump on you and they’ll tell you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Wordpress powers 40 % of the Internet, blah, blah, blah, blah, the king right now. It doesn’t mean 10, 15 years from now, they’re still going to be the king. And there’s some evidence that WordPress adoption may be slowing down or starting to plateau. We’ve had about five straight years of no market share growth, which is odd. Wordpress has been growing in market share every year since it existed. And that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it’s just a data point. And if you bring that up, people start coming at all sorts of excuses and blah, blah, blah. So I think complacency could be an issue. I think if everybody just thinks, well, WordPress will never go anywhere because it’s the king right now, then they’re not going to be very motivated to innovate and try to keep up with competition just because they look at the numbers and they say, oh, WordPress has this much and number two has this much.
[00:42:51.700] – James Welbes
We’re fine. We don’t need to worry about it. So I think that could be a problem. I also think AI could be a problem. I know a lot of people don’t want to admit that. There’s a lot of people who are just so sure that they’re just too important to be replaced by AI. And what they do is just too… It’s just too important. It’s too good. And AI can never replace what they do. And I would like to remind those people that AI is only three years old. It’s only been a thing for three years, and it’s already doing some pretty stupid things. You can build entire websites with it. I’ve built many WordPress plugins with it, and it’s only getting better. And if you’re looking at where it is right now and thinking, oh, it’s not a great solution right now, so therefore I don’t have to worry about it. I feel like that’s just not a smart way to go about looking at your business. I think you need to ask yourself, if AI is doing this after only three years, what is it going to be doing five years from now?
[00:43:54.720] – James Welbes
What is it going to be doing 10 years from now? I’m only 41. I probably have 20 more years, at least working. So what is what is AI going to be doing 15 years from now? Am I going to be working my last my last days in a factory because my skill has been rendered completely useless by AI? I don’t know. It’s entirely possible. 15 years is a very long time. So that’s something that not just WordPress is going to have to deal with. It’s something that Webflow, Squarespace, Shopify, everybody is going to have to be a little bit worried about what is what is AI going to be capable of?
[00:44:33.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, the future is going to be us working as electricians so we can make more server for AI.
[00:44:38.980] – James Welbes
Or batteries. I’ve seen the matrix. I know where this is going.
[00:44:43.280] – Kurt von Ahnen
So the complacency thing for me as a follow up is it’s interesting because I’m boots on the ground from my position. I talk at some of the schools, and kids that are in IT, like origin classes in high school and community college, they want to come hear my talks. And then when I give the talks, nobody in the room is familiar with WordPress. There’s no young energy coming. They like to talk about code. They like to talk about no code solutions. They, of course, love to talk about AI and building things with AI and vibe coding. It sounds cool. But my last talk had 60 kids in the room and only had ever heard of WordPress before, and they were all in IT classes. And so that really struck me as that complacency thing that you described is like, as a community, we need to do a better job of letting younger generations know what we do, what we use, how cool the tool could actually be. And to your point, I think if AI continues to grow in the WordPress space, we’re going to be able to do more and more with WordPress intuitively with AI.
[00:45:57.500] – Kurt von Ahnen
I don’t think AI and WordPress are necessarily not necessarily exclusive of each other. I think they’ll be tied together if we use it smartly.
[00:46:06.700] – James Welbes
Yeah, for sure. And when you say WordPress, that could mean different things. That could mean the actual platform. What do they have to worry about in the coming years, but it could also mean what are plugin developers going to have to worry about over the next five years? And AI is definitely something that I don’t understand. I’ve seen so many people who own companies that develop WordPress plugins and stuff who are like, oh, I’m just not worried at all about AI. No, we offer so much more than just a product. When you buy a plugin, you get the support, you get this and that and the planning and all this stuff. And it’s just like, bro, come on. People are building plugins with AI. If you sell plugins and you’re not worried about the fact that now people can build plugins by just talking at their computer, then I don’t know. How How are you even a successful business owner at this point? And I know that sounds very judgmental, but to just completely dismiss AI because, oh, I just offer so much more than that. Do you, though? You sell plugins. And if I can make a plugin yourself and not have to pay you $150 a year for that plugin for every single website that I’m using, you got to be worried about that, at least a little bit.
[00:47:23.930] – James Welbes
How could you not at least be somewhat worried about the impact that AI is going to have? Because you say, well, they come up with all these reasons about why it’s better to buy a plugin from someone like them versus making your own, and that everything they say is correct. However, people are idiots. So just because it’s a better idea to buy a plugin from a reputable company doesn’t I mean, people are going to. If they find out they can build a plugin with AI and save a little bit of money, they’re going to. Whether it’s a good idea or not, they’re still going to do it.
[00:47:52.540] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s always been there, isn’t it? There’s a difference between premier and free, isn’t it? I I agree with a lot what you say, but I also agree with some of the plugin producers. I think there’s a middle ground here, but I think we’re in a period of tremendous flux. Where the actual middle ground is, who knows? It’s still very difficult to make a judgment call, but I definitely agree with… Well, there’s a famous WordPress YouTube influencer that made a couple of months ago, a notorious video where he said that no WordPress plugin should be more than $50, and to spend more than $50 on a plugin was madness. Obviously, that statement was a bit of click bait, a little bit.
[00:48:50.840] – James Welbes
That video pissed me off.
[00:48:54.100] – Jonathan Denwood
It was such a ridiculous statement in some ways, but he’s got one of the largest YouTube channels in the WordPress space to some extent. It does make you wonder, doesn’t it? So Kurt’s got to go off quickly, and hopefully we can have some bonus content. I think you’re up for it, James. But let’s go for the final question. If you could go back to the beginning of your career journey, what little bit of tips or quick bit of advice, if you had five minutes to yourself and you could go back to the start, What would you tell yourself, Jones?
[00:49:33.380] – James Welbes
I mean, aside from buy all the Bitcoin that you can, if I wasn’t allowed to take advantage of the stock market, I would tell myself, I think I would say, don’t join the Navy. Instead, take web design or web development seriously. Because like I mentioned before, I didn’t take it seriously at all until probably into my sometime in my 20s. And I feel like I really missed out on the… What do they call it? The dot com boom or whatever. I feel like I could have made so much money in high school building websites because nobody knew how to build websites back then. And I could have actually started to build a business and really build a name for myself back then, as opposed to waiting until I’m in my 20s and everybody’s building websites. And you got people in India building websites for $100. And I just really feel like I missed an opportunity there to focus on web development when I was younger. And when my brain was younger and it’s easier to learn stuff, I would love to know how much would I know right now about things like JavaScript and PHP if I had started trying to learn those things when I was 16 instead of waiting until my 20s to try to learn those things.
[00:50:54.350] – James Welbes
So I think that would be my advice is just actually learn this, take it seriously, and start a business.
[00:51:02.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Good advice. We’re going to wrap it up now. James, but we’re going to do bonus content, and you’ll be able to listen and watch the bonus content and the full interview on the WP Tonic YouTube channel. Please go over there and watch the whole interview, and subscribe to the channel. That really does support the show. James, we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. What’s the best way for people to find out more about How about you, James?
[00:51:32.800] – James Welbes
You can find me on Twitter at James Wellbus. I also have a website that is in the process of being built, jameswellbus. Com. Probably Twitter. If you just want to connect and learn more about me, probably Twitter is the best way to do that.
[00:51:53.920] – Jonathan Denwood
And, Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you, Kurt?
[00:51:59.120] – Kurt von Ahnen
For business I’m at Manana Nomas, Manana Nomas on all the socials and manananomas. Com. And then if you want to connect personally, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn a lot, and I’m the only Kurt Von Omen there.
[00:52:10.770] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. We will be back next week with another I think we’ll be, but I’m not sure, actually. It might be Christmas. It’s been since Christmas. Christmas next week. We probably won’t be here. Will we? I don’t know. I will not be here next week. No, we won’t be there next week. Sorry, I’m losing track here, but we will be back the following week. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. That’s the bonus. This is going to bonus content, folks. I think one of the problems that’s happened with WordPress is that Gutenberg, we had that bit of fun, so I went through that list of page builders, and we could have talked about a lot of others. That was a short list. There’s probably another 12. I think we just covered the most popular ones, but we probably left out quite a few. But one of the points of Gutenberg was that it was supposedly was going to unify the market to some extent around Gutenberg. And what’s happened fundamentally is the opposite. It’s actually splintered off into different page builders. Some of them use Gutenberg. They are using Gutenberg libraries, and then some are full editing solutions, some aren’t.
[00:54:00.980] – Jonathan Denwood
Then you’ve got a whole selection that aren’t Gutenberg at all. Do you think that’s been one of the problems that this key change in WordPress, i. E. Gutenberg, has done the opposite of one of its main aims? Or do you think I’m totally wrong there?
[00:54:23.820] – James Welbes
No, I don’t think you’re wrong. I think… And some people will point to what you just said, and they’ll call that a feature. They’ll say, well, it’s open source. And so there’s options and there’s competition. And it’s great. It’s great that we can use the block editor or we can use the element or whatever. And there’s some merit to that idea of there being lots of options. But There’s also merit in some amount of consistency and just knowing what you’re going to get and knowing what to expect versus what I mentioned earlier, you might have 20 clients whose websites you manage, and you have 20 clients, so you probably have 10 different builders that you’re dealing with. Every time you log in to a website, it’s a whole different experience, and you have to wrap your head around, okay, how do I do that in this website again? Oh, yeah, that’s right. I got to go here. And It’s frustrating. So I don’t think you’re wrong. I think Gutenberg came to the party a little bit late. I wonder what the WordPress ecosystem would be like if Gutenberg had come out before Elementor and Divi and all these builders started to get really popular because those builders got very popular.
[00:55:38.400] – James Welbes
And people who wanted to build websites without code really got excited about some of these page builders. And then Gutenberg came along and some people wrote dumb blog articles. Is Gutenberg the page builder killer? I mean, they were writing those dumb articles like when Gutenberg came out. And it was like, no, it’s not the page builder killer. You can’t do anything in Gutenberg, hardly. There’s so many things you can’t do that you can do in things like Elementor. I wonder what it would have been like if maybe Gutenberg had been first to the market and then maybe more people would have built things around that as opposed to building a whole new experience like did be your element or?
[00:56:22.320] – Jonathan Denwood
I think the other thing is you got the DIY or the owner building their website. I’ve moved to a new state about six months ago. When I’m talking to local business owners and they’ve They find out I’ve got something to do with the web or something. They say, Well, I’m looking to build a site. I’m going to build it in Wix or Squarespace. I hardly hear anybody say that DIY individual, that small business owner, for whatever reason, they haven’t got the budget or whatever, they want to build something. I hardly hear them say WordPress. I just hear them say Wix or Squarespace. But then you’ve got the agency, the town, the city agency owner, the 10, 20 person agency, web design, PI our digital marketing agency in your city of half a million people. I think they’ve been the backbone of WordPress, haven’t they? To some extent, either they’re going to look at Webflow or they’re going to look at WordPress, aren’t they, really? I feel. Where do you think WordPress is with that digital marketing agency at the present moment, do you think? Because if that disappears rapidly, I think WordPress will be in a lot of difficulty.
[00:58:08.680] – James Welbes
Oh, yeah. Wordpress is not DIY friendly. I don’t know why. There’s a lot of people who would just swear up and down, Oh, WordPress is so DIY friendly. Wordpress is for everyone. And everybody knows that when you try to make something for everyone, it ends up not being for anyone. If you really want to build a a good product, you have to decide who are you going to build it for? And then you build it for that person. It’s impossible to build a web development tool that is literally for everyone, where people who have no technical capabilities can use it to build a good website, and people with technical capabilities can do it. It’s just not possible to do that. And WordPress hasn’t done it. And a lot of people within WordPress think they’ve done it, but they haven’t. I guarantee, I dare you to do one of these change my mind type things, go set up a table somewhere busy and say, I will give somebody $500 if they can build an actual functioning website with WordPress in whatever, one hour. They can’t do it. It’s impossible for a non-tech person who’s not familiar with this stuff to make that happen.
[00:59:20.560] – James Welbes
They probably could do it with Wix because with Wix, you literally log in and you start building. With WordPress, you log in and you’re like, now what? You You go to the front of your website, it looks terrible. You’re like, well, how do I change that? Where’s the options to… Then you find themes and you’re searching through a whole bunch of themes in the free theme market. And you see one that you like, you click on it, you hit activate, you go look at the front of your website. It looks nothing like that theme demo that you just saw. There’s just no way. And that’s if you even get to that point, if you can even figure out how to sign up for a hosting package, and then you choose the WordPress option, and then you got to connect a domain name. You don’t know how to do that. It’s not It’s not a DIY friendly solution. It is very much a developer friendly solution, which is why it’s so popular. Developers and agencies are the ones driving WordPress and keeping it alive. It’s not the DIY mom and pop shops who are building their own website for their little business.
[01:00:15.620] – James Welbes
Those people are not keeping WordPress alive. It’s absolutely the agencies.
[01:00:21.560] – Jonathan Denwood
In some ways, I thought there was a miss, but it was still… I’ve attempted not to I don’t personally attack anybody. I have a little dig up for people, and I’m a bit of English sarcasm, but in general, I don’t go on Twitter starting attacking people, personally. I’ve never done that, nor will I ever do that. I might have a dig at the occasional person who I think is a bit of a prick, basically, but maybe I should even stop doing that. But I think what you’ve said is spot on, and I think wordpress. Com should have been that DIY solution. It could have, in some ways. And I saw nothing wrong with that. Because if that business grows or decides that they want to bring in an agency to build, you would then have a much easier transformation in maybe using something that’s self-hosted. But it never really happened, did it? I really couldn’t recommend somebody who’s looking at Wix or Squarespace that they should look at wordpress. Com. I don’t think I could do that to somebody. Would you agree with that?
[01:01:48.360] – James Welbes
Yeah. If somebody came to me and said, I want to build my own website. I know nothing about web development. What should I do? I would say, first of all, don’t use WordPress. I would just specifically call that out. I would say, don’t use WordPress. You’re going to waste your time. It’s not for you. And then as far as the other ones go, it’s hard to know which one is going to work better for them, depending on what they’re doing. If they’re trying to just set up a shop, they probably just want to go to Shopify. If they’re just putting together a basic brochure website, probably just hop on Wix or Squarespace. But absolutely, I would never send somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing to WordPress. You can build a site If you know what you’re doing, you can build a site in WordPress, and if you do it correctly, those people could then somewhat manage that website and update the content and stuff like that. But starting from scratch to build the whole thing, no, absolutely not.
[01:02:48.100] – Jonathan Denwood
Do you think that situation can be improved or does it have to be accepted? Because I was talking to Ben Sibly last week, the the co founder of independent analytics, a great WordPress plugin, and he still has his own theme shop. He said that it’s died down that business, but he’s got a lot of legacy clients. He said one of the consequences of Gutenberg is it’s made the whole thing much more complicated than just installing a theme on WordPress and then getting going. He felt it made the whole thing a lot more complicated.
[01:03:34.800] – James Welbes
Yeah. The truth is, this sounds like we’re being very negative about WordPress.
[01:03:42.080] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, well, I’m accused of that quite a bit. But I think there’s a difference between being realistic and… Yeah, but there’s probably a balance. I would hope that I don’t come across as too negative. I think some people say I’m negative all the time, but it’s a hard balance, isn’t it?
[01:04:05.500] – James Welbes
Yeah, but to be fair to WordPress, it is very difficult to take a person who is not tech savvy and give them a tool that they can use to build a functioning website. We talk all this stuff about how, Oh, I would never send a DIY person to WordPress. But also I’ve seen what these DIY people are with Wix and Squarespace. It’s like, I mean, if you can afford it- It’s not right. It’s not right. Exactly. There’s really no great solution for a DIY person other than save your money in hire somebody. That’s the best thing you can do is if you own a business and you want a website, save up your money. Go ahead and build something yourself if you absolutely need to get something up on the Internet. Go to Wix, build a crappy website, but start saving giving your money and hire somebody to build a better website. That’s the best advice you can give to a DIY person. It’s not just WordPress. I think WordPress is probably one of the worst options for a DIY person, but there’s really no good option for somebody who’s just not tech savvy and doesn’t know what they’re doing.
[01:05:17.480] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s well observed, actually, James. I totally agree with you there because I’m in the educational community space. We compete with Kajab. We try and promote WordPress on my little business, my boutique hosting and agency business. We are against Mighty Network or Kajabi or the 20 other learning management systems and community like Mighty Networks or Circle. They assess products, they market themselves as being simple, but they’re not simple. It just really depends on your experience. Because there’s a whole industry of Kajabi implementers. There’s an army of Mighty Network consultants. There’s an army… It’s like Shopify, isn’t it? If you’ve got apps, Absolutely no experience about e-commerce, it’s probably going to be a little bit simpler than woo, but a lot of that is down to Wu and its history history, isn’t it? But I’ve helped people with large Shopify or expanded Shopify set-ups. And if you’re just going with a bog standard one, you’re going to be fine. But they tend never to be bog standard. How would you respond? Or do you think I’m wrong about this? I don’t know if I’m waffling at all, actually, John.
[01:06:59.620] – James Welbes
Yeah, Maybe a little bit. I agree. I think I agree with you. And Woocommerce is even another level of if you’re a DIY person trying to set up an online store, dude, you will just give up and you will go get a job in a factory. If you’re trying to set up an online store with WordPress and Woocommerce. First of all, if you’ve managed to get to the point where you’ve logged into a WordPress website, you don’t know what Woocommerce is. You’re sitting there going, okay, how do I add product to this website? I don’t know. Then you Google it and you’re like, Oh, I need to use something called Woocommerce. Is that different? I thought I was using WordPress, so I need to use Woocommerce instead. Oh, wait, Woocommerce is the thing that I add to WordPress? It’s just a whole like, don’t even think about it, dude. If you’re trying to sell a product, use Shopify or Squarespace. Don’t even bother with trying to use WordPress. It’s going to be too much. I think these brochure websites I mentioned earlier for DIYers, I think that’s actually where AI is going to come in because Wix is going to be a learning curve.
[01:08:09.520] – James Welbes
Squarespace is going to be a learning curve. Webflow is a learning curve. But AI, not really much of a learning curve. You open Lovable and you type in, I own a bakery in Pennsylvania, and this is the name of the bakery. Upload, here’s my logo that my designer gave me. Here’s what I want to tell people about my bakery. Here’s the address of the store. Here’s the hours that it’s open. Here’s the different types of bakery things that we sell. Go. And it makes a website and you can add a domain. You click publish, you’re done. That’s, again, probably not going to be the greatest website in the world, and you should probably start saving your money and hire someone. But that is going to be a better product than you logging into Wix and trying to build a website for yourself when you have no idea what you’re doing. That those websites, if When you’re out there and you have a whole business built around building small brochure websites, you are absolutely going to be replaced by AI. I will bet everything I own on that. There’s five years from now, why on Earth would anybody pay someone to put together a one-page landing page about their bakery when you could do it in AI in literally a minute for free?
[01:09:24.320] – James Welbes
I mean, those are the people who really need to be worried. Wordpress users might have a little bit of a We might not have to worry about AI quite yet, but people just banging out little brochure websites, they need to be scared.
[01:09:39.360] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, because you got the whole army of marketing in every town or city of a couple of hundred thousand to half a million to a million. There’s a whole group of digital marketers that help market local businesses, don’t they? They do a bit of web development, they do copywriting, they give consultancy, social media outbranding, and helping small business with their social media outreach video. They’re a whole mini shop, aren’t they? Ained at not the more established agencies that got employees. They tend to be one individuals, don’t they? I think what you’re saying is, do you think they’re going to be hit hard? Because they’re doing more than just produce the website, aren’t they? They’re producing the copy, they’re giving some advice about social media, aren’t they? Or do you think the days of those… Would you agree that of those type of people that I’m outlining anyway?
[01:11:00.340] – James Welbes
Yeah. The more you can do, the better off you’re going to be. But again, you mentioned content. Ai is writing content already, and it’s going to get better. And even if it’s not great, again, people are going to use it anyways. If they have to choose between paying somebody 50 cents a word or whatever, I don’t even know how copywriters charge things. If you have to choose between paying somebody to write your content or going to Gemini and getting content for free there, a lot of people are going to choose the free option, even if it’s not as good. So, yeah, people like that who offer a lot of services might be a little bit better off if they’re offering a total package. People are going to want to start moving more towards strategy, I think, versus deliverables, because AI is going to be delivering deliverables. And strategy is going to be one way that you can set yourself apart from AI. But not everybody’s built for that. That’s the problem. That’s what worries me. There’s a lot of people out there who are fantastic developers, but that’s really all they’re good at. They’re not good at marketing.
[01:12:10.250] – James Welbes
They’re not good at brand strategy, whatever. And so if AI gets to the point where they’re taking a lot of those people’s customers. You can’t just look at them and go, Well, just pivot, just get into strategy, because they might not be good at that. And so that’s something that worries me for myself. It worries me for other people, it worries me for a whole economy, to be honest. I’m very worried and interested about what our economy is going to be like 10, 15 years from now.
[01:12:41.920] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think nobody really knows, isn’t it? I think the present large language models, this is only my interpretation. I might be totally wrong because I’m not an expert in AI in any shape or form, but I have watched a lot, listened and observed a lot of discussion around AI. I think we all have. I think these large learning models, especially around coding, I think you’re correct, they will improve. I think of the professional coders that I know, I think if you’re an experienced coder, I think some of these coding AI platforms can make It can make a lot of coding’s, the bugging, and it’s painful. I think AI is perfect for the bugging to some extent. I think for larger projects, if it turns out, I’ve spoken to some very experienced developers. He said, in turn, it’s caused even more work because it just produces a load of ton of code and somebody has to go into it and sort out the bugs. It’s made things But that’s been more about processes that were… Trying to use it and pushing it too far. But on the other hand, if it’s been controlled, it has increased the performance of the experienced developer, but you got to find the right balance.
[01:14:23.300] – Jonathan Denwood
I think when it comes to other things, I think the idea that it’s intelligence, I think that’s been well over emphasized, and I would even challenge that. The prospect of general AI intelligence, I think that it might happen in the next 5, 10 years. If that happens, we really do have some problems on our hands. I personally think it’s probably going to take a little bit longer. I don’t think large learning models are going to be the technology that leads to that, really. I think they’re probably reach the limit of scaling can achieve. I think they’re going to be improvements, but that dramatic ability for general intelligence. I think that’s probably been over-hyped, and I think it was done to get… And I think the energy, the environmental energy costs have been well under delayed, but it’s all up in the air, isn’t it, James? None of us really know. I think even the people that are working for these AI laboratories don’t really know where it’s going to go, really.
[01:15:48.160] – James Welbes
Yeah, it definitely has. It has improved significantly at tasks like debugging. When I first started using it, I was using ChatGPT and would type things into it, copy and paste the code it generated into VS Code, and that was a huge pain. ChatGPT would often forget what it had already done, change things unnecessarily, and break things, which was very frustrating. And I started doing that two years ago. I now use Clawed 4.5 within Copilot in VS Code. And it’s improved significantly in many ways. It’s a lot like, I imagine, when you hire a developer, if you’re the senior developer and you hire a new developer, you’re like, All right, here’s our product. And you’re like, This is how we do things. With everything, there are 10 different ways to do it. I used to have a boss who said, There are 10 ways to do it, pick one. And it’s like that with development. There are different ways of doing things. Every company has its own way of doing things in development, with procedures it follows.
[01:16:59.640] – James Welbes
There are also general standards that everyone tries to follow. So when you hire a new developer, you tell them all those things. This is how we do it. When we create a new plugin, this is the scaffolding we use. This is how we do things here. You have to do that with AI as well. If all you do is open up AI and say, “I need a WordPress plugin, and I want to do this,” you don’t know what you’ll get. And if you do that again with the same model, a different plugin, and you compare the two, you’re going to get oftentimes two different pathways different ways to create a plugin, and you’re going to be like, Where did it get this from? But if you actually tell it how you do things and the specific things that you want done certain ways, particularly when it creates its own file in your project, an instructions file that you can edit yourself, and you can tell it what you want to do and how you want to scaffold plugins and all this stuff. And if you do that, you will get a much better, more consistent experience with the work your AI bot does for you.
[01:17:58.900] – James Welbes
And it’s also getting much better at debugging. So when there are issues, it can scan all the files much faster than you can with your human eyeballs, and it can scan all the files and go, “Oh, yeah, well, here’s the problem.” This function is whatever. So, yeah, I agree with you. It’s improving, and there will likely be a point at which it stops improving. I don’t think we’re super close to that point yet. I think we’re going to see some significant improvements, particularly. You probably might be right there, especially in coding, because I believe coding and the limited world of coding are very suitable for large learning models.
[01:18:43.900] – Jonathan Denwood
But I’m not an expert on it, so I’m just… That might be totally wrong. All right, I think we’re going to wrap it up now, James. You’ve been a fantastic guest. Hopefully, you enjoyed the experience. Well, I’d love to say, What’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, James?
[01:19:04.680] – James Welbes
Well, I forgot earlier that I have a YouTube channel. You asked me this question before.
[01:19:11.800] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s why I thought I’d ask it.
[01:19:15.160] – James Welbes
Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, so again, you can find me on Twitter, of course, James Wellvis, but I also have a YouTube channel called World’s Worst Web Developer. If you search YouTube for World’s Worst Web Developer, you’ll find it. There is a lot of edge content on that channel, although it’s not 100% Edge content. It is supposed to be web development. It’s just me personally, that’s the world I’m living in right now. Hey, Sebastian. Yeah, you are pretty late. We’re about to wrap it up, but definitely watch this later. Also, I’m on LinkedIn, although I dislike LinkedIn. If you’re on LinkedIn and that’s where you want to find me, go for it. I do see it. I will see your connection request. I will see your messages. But I personally am most active on Twitter wrap it up now.
[01:20:04.500] – Jonathan Denwood
As I said, we won’t see you next week, but we’ll see you the week after. See you soon, folks. Bye.
[01:20:10.020] – James Welbes
Bye.
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