AI is now part of almost every job I do. I use it to build WordPress websites faster, to track down and fix website problems in a fraction of the time they used to take, to write the code and structured data that help my clients get recommended by AI search engines, and to generate and edit images. I review every change myself, I test on a copy of the site before anything goes live, and because the work takes fewer hours, you pay for fewer hours.
That’s the short version. A lot of businesses are vague about how they use AI, either because they’re worried it sounds lazy or because they’re overselling it. I’d rather just tell you exactly what happens behind the scenes at Penner Web Design.
The tools I actually use
I don’t use a dozen AI products. I use a few, heavily.
- Claude (from Anthropic) is my main working partner for code, troubleshooting, research, and writing. It runs on my computer, connected to local copies of client websites, so it can read the actual files and database instead of guessing.
- Google’s Gemini handles image generation and image editing: the laptop and phone mockups in my portfolio, cleaned-up photos, and visuals for blog posts.
- AI image upscaling rescues photos that are too small or too soft to use, which comes up constantly with client-supplied images.
Building websites faster
A lot of website building is careful, repetitive work: laying out the same kind of section twenty times, writing a title and description for every page, adding alt text to every image, getting the details right on mobile. That’s where AI saves the most time.
On my own site, I recently rewrote the search title and description for 146 pages in one afternoon, a job that would have taken a couple of weeks by hand. On a recent project for an award-winning New York architect, AI audited every section of every page for inconsistent spacing on phones and helped build one sitewide system to fix it, instead of me eyeballing pages one by one. You can see the results in the AKA Insight case study.
What AI doesn’t do is decide what your site should look like or say. I still make the design calls, and I still write or rewrite anything that goes out with your name on it.
Fixing website problems in record time
This is honestly where AI has changed my business the most. When a WordPress site breaks, most of the time goes into figuring out why. AI can read error logs, plugin code, and server responses far faster than I can, so the hunting part of the job shrinks, and I get to spend my time on the fix.
A few real examples from the last couple of months:
- A pharmacy’s hours plugin was quietly breaking the WordPress editor, so the staff couldn’t save changes. We traced it to the plugin printing code in the wrong place, fixed it, and applied the same fix to other sites using it.
- An online shop’s shipping rates had silently stopped working because the carrier retired an old system. The working key was sitting in the site’s database the whole time. We found it, proved the fix on a copy of the site, and restored live rates.
- A busy WooCommerce store had a caching setting that could show private store data to the wrong visitors. We caught it during a speed audit and switched it off the same day.
- For another client, a scary-looking “critical” Site Health warning turned out to come from a feature bundled inside an image optimization plugin, not a real problem. Knowing that saved them from paying to fix something that wasn’t broken.
None of these were one-click fixes. But each one took hours instead of days, and that’s the difference that shows up on your invoice. If your site is acting up right now, my WordPress troubleshooting and repair page explains how to get it looked at.
AI that edits WordPress directly
AI tools can now connect to a WordPress site and make changes themselves: updating a page, fixing a batch of product descriptions, adding structured data, converting old tables into modern blocks. That’s powerful, and it’s also a great way to break a website if you’re careless.
So here are my rules. AI works on a local copy or a draft first, never straight on your live site. I back up before every change. Changes are scoped to one page or one field at a time. I check the result with my own eyes before it goes live. And passwords stay locked in my computer’s keychain, never pasted into a file or a chat.
I learned that last part the practical way. Early on, an automated edit stripped a few characters from a page’s layout code and the page broke. Because it had been backed up first, it was restored in minutes, and the rule about checking every change got stricter. I wrote a whole post on this: AI can now edit WordPress sites. Here’s how we do it safely.
Helping businesses get recommended by AI search
More people now ask ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude “who should I hire?” instead of scrolling through search results. If your business isn’t in that answer, you don’t exist to that customer.
So I built a service around it. I use AI to audit how AI engines see a business, then fix what I find: structured data that describes who you are and what you do, answer-first pages AI can quote, crawler access for the legitimate AI search bots, an llms.txt file, and the off-site listings and mentions that AI uses to double-check you’re real. The details are on my AI Search Optimization (AEO and GEO) service page.
One lesson from that work surprised me. For one manufacturer client, the website was already technically excellent, but AI still never named their newest product. The gap wasn’t on their site at all. It was the lack of independent articles and forum threads about that product category. That’s why I’ll always tell you honestly where the real problem is, even when it’s not something I can fix with code.
What I’m working on right now
- AI search optimization projects for local businesses and a national manufacturer, including knowledge-base pages built to answer the exact questions buyers ask AI.
- Mobile layout and speed work for an architecture firm, including cutting one page from 52.7 MB to 6.5 MB.
- A recruiting-focused website for a Durham salon suite company, where AI image editing produced a clean exterior photo without a reshoot. See the WanderLux Salon Suites project.
- Small custom web tools, like calculators, trackers, and interactive maps, that used to be too expensive for a small business to justify.
- This website. The blog post you’re reading, its featured image, and the structured data behind it were all built with AI help and reviewed by me.
What I don’t use AI for
- I don’t let AI make changes to a live site without my review.
- I don’t publish AI writing without editing it. It’s a first draft, not a finished product.
- I don’t hand off your project to AI and disappear. You still text me, and I still answer.
- I don’t claim AI can guarantee rankings or AI recommendations. Nobody can honestly promise that.
Why this is good news for your budget
The simplest way to say it: when a fix takes 20 minutes instead of two hours, you pay for 20 minutes. AI lets a small, owner-run studio in Durham take on work that used to need a whole agency, and it lets me say yes to projects that used to be too expensive to attempt. I’m passing those savings along instead of pocketing them, which is why my quotes today are often lower than they would have been a few years ago for the same work.
If you’re curious what that looks like for your site, the free website checkup is a good place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. AI helps with layout, code, page titles and descriptions, alt text, structured data, and troubleshooting. Every design decision and every change that goes live is reviewed by Toban Penner personally, and work is tested on a copy of the site first.
Not when a person is responsible for it. AI speeds up the repetitive parts of the work, which leaves more time for design, testing, and the details that make a site feel custom. The quality still comes from human judgment and review.
Usually, yes. Work that takes fewer hours costs fewer hours. Penner Web Design passes that time savings on to clients rather than billing the old number of hours for faster work.
It can be, with the right process: work on a local copy or draft first, back up before every change, limit each change to one page or field, verify the result, and never store passwords in plain text. Letting AI edit a live site without those safeguards is risky.
Yes. Penner Web Design offers AI Search Optimization (AEO and GEO): structured data, answer-first content, AI crawler access, llms.txt, and off-site listings that help AI engines understand and recommend your business. No one can guarantee AI recommendations, but these are the signals AI systems rely on.
Want to see what AI-assisted web design can do for you?
Penner Web Design is Toban Penner, a WordPress designer and developer in Durham, NC, working with businesses across the Triangle and around the country. Take a look at recent work, read about AI search optimization, or tell me about your project. You can also call or text 919-724-4417.
