Building static-ish web sites that scale with Laravel and coding agents
With Laravel's extremely strict underlying framework, and a very strong context document that codifies architectural, syntactical, and content choices and grows with every step, it is now genuinely possible to describe a web site's features and have them built near automatically.
This results in a site where almost no code was written manually - but all the architectural nuts and bolts, and the design, are human-designed and verified.
Service pages for SEO/GEO and Topical Authority
Content structures and custom post types like several dozen service pages that serve to build topical authority with search engines and AI's can be implemented in record time - even when, like me, you still insist on creating most of the actual text content yourself.
Frictionless media handling and optimization
Media like images or video are ingested and, using skills, calling command-line tools, optimized in modern media formats like webm and avif, and cropped to the right size and integrated in the right place using plain language. Even intelligent image cropping ("crop image so only the car is visible") and video cutting is possible - right from the chat box.
A complete audit trail for code and content
Each change in the website's code or content becomes a commit in a Git repository, allowing easy rollback to previous versions and a 100% audit trail for each piece of the site.
Near-perfect Lighthouse performance score
Extensive optimizations for a 100% Lighthouse score also go from taking days to hours.
Drastically improved security
Not using WordPress, its associated plugins and the inherent security issues with using the world's most popular website engine leads to a drastically reduced attack surface.
While, of course, security flaws are also possible in Laravel or its underlying libraries and server software, the surface for regular web-based attacks like those that plague WordPress becomes nearly zero because there is no CMS exposed.
Evaluating the proof of concept
On the coding end, this method still requires human oversight. Building features is a very fine-grained process, not just issuing a prompt. It is very much comparable to a senior developer giving chunks of work to junior developers.
The speedup in the hands of a capable professional is notable - I'd estimate it at 3x to 10x.
And it is only a matter of time that this method of editing will become reasonably accessible to everyone. The ease of dictating changes into a microphone like you would to a human developer or assistant, instead of arduously logging into a CMS, clicking buttons and typing text, is addictive and makes using a regular CMS feel like a chore. While CMS's are unlikely to go away anytime soon, this mode will doubtlessly be the future of content management in many cases.
Looking for something like this?
For an independent-minded solo entrepreneur, artist, photographer, author, small business who
- wants to also build and maintain their web site with mainly a microphone
- wants this to work with code that they own and can take to any hosting provider instead of it being stuck in a silo
- is fine with the workflow still being a little technical
...this future could be reality today! Let's talk.