Can ChatGPT Replace a Web Developer?

Key Takeaways

You want to work for yourself. You want a business. But in today's world, business that's not online is basically unknown. You have to be on the web. So, how do you do that if you have basically no tech skills? I'm going to show you exactly how you can do it and how you can get help along the way to make this really easy for you. This video today is being sponsored by Cloudways. I work with Cloudways um for my web hosting and have for several years now. I haven't been with any other website host for nearly as long as I've been with Cloudways cuz every single one of them at some point eventually lets me down. With Cloudways, I've been very happy. I've been able to grow and shrink and do so without ever breaking the bank and they've got all the features I want. It's easy enough to use as long as you have a little bit of guidance. And so that's what we're going to talk a little bit about today. Let's talk about what it takes to go set up your new website. So, let's say that I know what my domain name is going to be. Maybe I've even gone so far as to pick one and even register it. If you have, great. If you haven't, that's not too complicated of a process either. You can register it through sites like GoDaddy or any NameCheep, any number of others. I use Cloudflare. It's the cheapest option. They don't charge any sort of an upcharge. So, here's Cloudflare. I'm logged in right here and I've got a ton of domains. I'm going to go ahead and grab one that I'm not using for anything else and we're going to use it for this video. How about this one right here, fixtureddiy.com. That's actually a site that I am needing to create. So, in this video, we're going to go ahead and we're going to create it. First thing that I do is I go to Cloudways. Cloudways is where I host my website. Now, for those who don't know what I'm talking about, hosting is literally just where we're going to store the files. All the files for your website have to exist somewhere on a server. Well, those servers, you can just have them like in your house and have that connected to the internet. But for the most part, we tend to use servers that exist in server banks all around the world. And other companies have created those for us and allow us to use pieces of those. And if we use a server that's set up to be able to specifically work for WordPress, which is the builder that we're going to use for our websites, then that just makes this all easier. And Cloudways is set up like that. So, let me show you the process here of creating a website. I'm going to show you just how easy it is. And again, we're going to get a little bit of help along the way because I'm going to pretend from now on that I have no idea what I'm doing. So, I just got here and I see a button in the upper right. It says start free. Down here it says try now free. Let's do that. Okay. I'm going to enter my first name and last name. I will be just other businesses and I don't spend very much on hosting. I don't want to. I'm going to agree to Cloudways terms of service and I'm going to sign up. That part I didn't need a whole lot of technical skill to do. Pretty simple form. And I sign up. Now I can verify my email address. All right. It took a couple of minutes, but I got the email. I verified it. Now I'm going to put in a phone number. All right. And I'm going to start with a free trial for 3 days. This is cool because it lets you set up your site and make sure that you can do all this for 3 days without even having to put in a credit card. Okay. So now here I am. WordPress. Let's say I don't know. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to my favorite whatever uh AI you like to use if you don't know. And I'm just gonna ask it questions if I don't know stuff. So here it says, "The safest choice is to go with the latest stable version." So unless you know a plugin or theme that requires something older, the newest stable release, usually the default Cloudways highlights at the top of the list. That's what we're going to do. And if you don't know what any of these others are, just choose the top one, which is going to be probably the best option. Application name. It's just a label you give your WordPress site so you can identify it. Oh, okay. So I can just name it. I'll just name it Fixster. Uh, what's the server name? It's just a label for the name of my server. Okay, so I'll just call it fixter server because this is the only website I'm putting on it. Okay, so what's a project? And see how I can just have this conversation back and forth with the AI. A project is a folder or container where you group applications. Oh, well, I'm only going to have one, so I don't really care. We'll just call it Ricky's project. Okay. Select the stack that best suits your requirements, or switch between them seamlessly to enhance performance. a hybrid setup with HT access support. Fast and simple NGINX. Okay. Well, look at that. They've got a button here that says help me choose the hybrid stack. Let's say I don't know what any of these are, right? So, built for speed, 10 times faster. It's still an experimental stage. Not recommended for Oh, for production environments. Okay. If it's not recommended, I'm not going to use it yet. Now, select your server. Okay. I've got Digital Ocean, Vulture. I don't know. Let's see. This is going to tell me. Cloudways lets you choose between digital ocean vulture. Lenode AWS and Google cloud digital ocean or vulture best balance of cost plus performance very popular. Lenode similar to digital ocean AWS more powerful but expensive. Here it's suggesting digital ocean premium or vulture high frequency. Server size 1 GB RAM is entry-le fine for small sites but it can feel sluggish if you add plugins. So here it's going to say my practical recommendation digital ocean premium 2 GB of RAM about $22 a month. Here it's telling me for simple informationonly business site you don't need big expensive servers on cloudways the sweet spot's usually one of these digital ocean 1 gigabyte 1 core 25 gigabyte solid state drive 11 to $14 a month or vulture high frequency $13 to $15 a month this is telling me I can go with the 1 gigabyte and here if you expect it to grow you can upgrade I like this second answer better by the way being someone who's is techsavvy and has done this a lot start with the 1 gigabyte while you're setting up your site if it starts to get too low. The cool thing is you can always upgrade. Downsizing your server is harder to do. You can do it, but you actually have to end up migrating your site to another server that's smaller. It's actually easier to start small and grow from there. I would just go with the 1 GBTE, even though it's telling you you should go with the bigger one. But Digital Ocean or Vulture. Digital Ocean, I agree with this. It says to go with the premium or if you're going to do Vulture, do high frequency. That's correct. I agree with that. Between the two, it's a tossup. Use whichever one you want. Digital Ocean is going to be a little cheaper. So here I've got 1 gigabyte on Digital Ocean or I can do Vulture. That's $16 a month. If I go with Digital Ocean, then I can get down to $14 a month. So up to you. You can start out though setting this up for free. I'm going to go with Vulture High Frequency. And then I want to pick a location usually fairly close to me. What's it going to tell me? Rule of thumb, pick the data center closest to your primary audience. Most visitors are in the US. Choose something like Seattle, LA, Dallas, Chicago. I like to have it close to me. Granted, I am in the US. Mostly because I'm going to be serving out the website to an audience that's spread out, even if it's primarily in the US, and I'm going to be using Cloudflare, which is going to put my content, like duplicating parts of it, on servers all over the place. And so there's people are always going to be able to use my website essentially from a server that's fairly close to them. And so for when I'm working on the site, I like to have it somewhere close to me. But close to me and close to my audience is probably a good rule of thumb. So something like Chicago could actually work really well here. It's going to tell me go 2 GB or higher, but again, we can always upgrade like instantly. It's super easy. We're going to go launch this server. Okay. Do I have a website to migrate? I don't actually. So I don't need to worry about that. Okay. It's going to set this up. It's going to say it's going to take a few minutes. So now we're just going to just chill, I guess. Okay. Now I have a server. What do I do now? Okay, nice work. From here, your steps are connecting your domain. go to Cloudways applications and click on the app. Okay, I'm gonna go to applications and click on my application fixture. Okay, cool. And so, okay, it's going to have me access my WordPress dashboard. So, okay, admin panel. So, here, clicking on that does nothing, but this does. It opens it up in a new tab. I have a username and a password. That worked. Okay, so now I'm in. Now, what? Okay, now I point my domain to Cloudways. So, buy a domain. Says from Namecheep, GoDaddy, Google Domains. I use Cloudflare. I told you that. We're going to do that. I'm going to go to Cloudways. Said application management. I think that's where we are. Domain management. So, I'm in Cloudways. I click domain management right there. Now, it tells me enter your domain name. Okay. I'm going to click add domain and enter my domain. Main name. Fixtordy.com. Save changes. Is that it? Well, let's go check. Update the DNS at your registar. If I have a question about this, I could say, what is my registar? It's where you bought your domain. See how easy this is to just use AI. Okay, here we go. I know that was Cloudflare here. I can say DNS records or I can click DNS on the side. It's what it's telling me to do is update my DNS records. And it said create an A record pointing to your Cloudway server IP found in the server tab and then wait a bit. It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours. So, we're going to do that right now. We're going to click add record. Type Well, it said create an A record. Okay. I know what to do here, but I'm going to ask because I because here it says IPv4 address. Maybe that's the IP address they were talking about. It is, by the way. And I can also get the IP address right here in my access details. I don't have to go out to the server, but you can also just go to the fixture server. Okay, I'm going to put that there. For the A record, sometimes called host or at the root domain is set name to the at symbol. For a subdomain like www, I can do something else. Okay. Oh, so here it's telling me to have the www also point to the same server and that's smart. I usually use a CNAME record for this and I point it to just at, but you can also just have the WW point there. I'm going to do it my way. I like my way better. So here I'm going to put the at symbol. Create my A record and save it. Make sure you save it. And I'm going to add a second record. This one's going to be a CNAME record and it's going to be for the www and it's going to point to at or the website name fixdiy.com. See that? That's all we have to do at this point to point the domain to the website. Then it says wait a few minutes because it can take a few minutes. Once your domain's connected, go to SSL certificate. Okay, so it missed a step. This is where I mean you don't have to be super technical here, but if you notice here, it's showing fixdy not as the primary domain. I want it to be the primary domain. When people go to fixdiy.com, I don't want the address to show this. I want it to be the other way around. So I'm going to click the little three dots and make this my primary domain. So here's the other thing. If you're not very techsavvy, you watch videos like this one and they're going to walk you through exactly how to do all this stuff. Okay, there's so many tutorials on how to do everything here on YouTube, right? So, if you're at this point and you're like, I don't know what to do next, you can ask Chat GBT, you can ask any of your AI chat bots of choice, you can also click over here on the site, need a hand, and just type your questions in here and send a message. Their AI will try to help you. And if their AI doesn't answer the question, then you can get to a real person and they're going to help you. And I found Cloudway support to be really good and really helpful. They fix problems for me whenever I come across them. Okay, next. Once your domain is connected, go to the SSL certificate in my app settings. Oh, right here on the side. SSL certificate. Cool. All right. I'm going to fill in my information and my domain name and just install certificate just because I'm pretending I don't know anything. I'm going to ask this. So, this would if I were to have a bunch of subdomains like blogshop app. Um, if you don't know what that means, just don't apply wild card. If you do know what it means and you are going to do that, then you would do that. So, I'm not going to do it right now. I'm going to click install certificate and that's going to take a minute. Let's go back and see what CHP says is next. So, after the SSL, by the way, that turns your site into HTTPS. Everybody needs that nowadays. And honestly, I think Cloudflare is also giving you one automatically. Okay. Then we actually go into starting to actually build out the website, which isn't what we're covering here in this video, but let's go ahead and do backups. The CDN is already covered with Cloudflare CDN. So that's already done because we used Cloudflare. So if you followed this video, you're basically set up now except for we're going to do backups real quick and then you get to go start actually building your website, which I've covered in several other videos on this channel. So now here, this is cool. I can take a backup of my website at any time. But already by default, Cloudways is backing up your site for you. I think it's doing it every day. It's not giving me set settings to decide that though. I think that might be at the server level. So, let's check that. Click the fixture server backups every day and it's going to hold it for a week. So, it's going to take a backup each day, but every week it's going to overwrite an old backup if that makes sense. Local backups allows me to save it like onto my computer and I can do on demand backups at any time. All right. So, you didn't even have to set up backups. It's doing it automatically. Really, we're done. So, here at this point, what I'm going to do is go to that application again. I can click the www and click fixture. grab my password cuz it's making me log in again because I changed the domain name and added an SSL and everything. It took a few tries probably because the DNS servers and the SSL and everything wasn't all done yet. But now here we are. This is the dashboard for your website. And at this point, you can start doing all sorts of stuff. I can actually go view what my website looks on the front end, which is really, really plain. This is where the website building starts to take place. And this is where you're going to pick up in other videos again that I've created. And you can just ask Chat GPT right here. It's going to tell me I need a theme, which is true. Uh the theme I'm going to recommend is Cadence. I'll link to that in the description. I'll also link to Cloudways. I'll link to um the stuff I showed you, Cloudflare, Cloudways, and I'll link to Cadence. It's one I love. Astra and Generate Press are also really good themes. In fact, with Cloudways, we could have set it up, I believe, with Astra already installed, but the theme is essentially the foundation of the design and functionality of your website. So, the WordPress theme is important, and those are all good options. And like Cadence, I think all of these have a good free version with starter templates. Cadence has AI starter templates as well. So, literally I can start saying like just typing in, I want my website to kind of look like this and feel like this and it's about this and it's going to ask you questions and then it's just going to like propose designs for you like out of the box. It's just going to like build it all for you. Um, which is amazing. I wish they had this 10 years ago. Then it's going to do um plugins. Cloudways already installs Breeze. I agree with some of this, not necessarily all of it. It's going to tell you what what pages to build. The designs for these pages cadence is just going to do for you out of the box. It's going to help you pick colors on most of this stuff it's going to do. And then here it's giving me other ideas for other content and growth and everything like that. And I do want to thank Cloudways for sponsoring this video um and for just being such an amazing host when it comes to WordPress hosting. There's nobody else that I recommend more than Cloudways. So go check that out. Click the links. Use the links in the description to go build the website for your business. You can do this. I don't care how little experience you have with technology. You can do this. Using AI might feel overwhelming. It's totally doable. You literally just ask it questions like you would a human being. Like you would if you had to sit down with me and ask me to guide you through it. So go give that a try. And if this video is helpful for you, make sure you check out the other videos on the Income School YouTube channel. We'll see you all in the next one.