Build Helpful Hobby Websites Using AI and Real Human Experience
A part-time website owner can easily feel under pressure to publish more content. You may see recommendations to publish every day, several times per week or according to an ambitious monthly target. Missing that target can make you feel as though you are falling behind. That is not how I approach Action With AI. A … Read more
Publishing your first ten posts is often suggested as an early target for a new website. Ten sounds achievable. It is large enough to represent meaningful progress but small enough not to feel overwhelming. However, there is nothing magical about the number. Publishing a tenth post does not automatically create search traffic, establish authority or … Read more
Imagine printing every post from your website and dropping the pages into a large box. Every article might contain useful information. However, someone opening the box would have no idea where to begin, which pages belong together or what order they should read them in. Now imagine organising those same printouts into labelled sections. Each … Read more
When you install WordPress, it is easy to assume that your next job is to create every page mentioned in a website-building checklist. Home, About, Contact, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Terms and Conditions, Disclaimer, Resources, Services—the list can quickly make a small hobby website feel like a multinational company. In reality, you probably need far … Read more
WordPress itself is free, and hosting companies regularly advertise plans costing only a few pounds or dollars per month. That can make starting a hobby website appear almost free. The difficulty is that the advertised monthly figure rarely represents the complete amount you will pay. The lowest price may require several years of payment upfront, … Read more
Installing WordPress gives you an empty website and a large number of possible decisions. You may already have dozens of article ideas. Some will be basic beginner questions, while others will involve specialist parts of your hobby that you particularly enjoy. The obvious question is: what should you publish first? There is no universal first … Read more
When I first started Action With AI, I wrote about subjects that interested me. Artificial intelligence was developing quickly, so there was no shortage of possibilities. I wrote about large language models, individual AI tools and AI more generally. The site grew, but it did not have a properly planned structure. I eventually narrowed the … Read more
The worst time to investigate your website backups is immediately after something has gone wrong. I learned that lesson after using FileZilla to access the files on one of my websites. I was following a tutorial about removing old plugin folders that had not been deleted correctly. Unfortunately, I deleted essential plugin files and other … Read more
Privacy compliance can feel disproportionately complicated when you are building a relatively simple hobby website. You may only want to publish helpful articles, allow occasional comments and see whether anyone visits. Yet you soon encounter privacy policies, cookie policies, consent categories, regional legislation and plugins offering different levels of protection. It is tempting to install … Read more
I once installed a WordPress plugin to add concertina-style sections to my articles. It did what I wanted: readers could click a heading to expand or hide the text beneath it. Unfortunately, the website also became noticeably slower. When I removed the plugin, the speed improved significantly. I never established whether it conflicted with something … Read more