How I built TedJohnsonWorks.com without hiring an agency.

I spent a career working in technology, but building a modern personal site still forced me to learn some new habits. I did not want a generic author page, a noisy storefront, or five disconnected mini-sites fighting for attention.

I wanted one durable home for books, practical technology and AI, direct help, strength and practice, stories, and whatever comes next.

The first decision was architecture, not appearance.

It was tempting to begin with colors, banners, and buttons. Instead, the bigger question was: what belongs together?

The site eventually settled into three subject pillars: Story & Meaning, Technology, AI & Learning, and Strength & Practice. Products, books, services, articles, and recommendations then became formats inside those pillars rather than competing categories.

ChatGPT became the working partner.

I use AI to help think through structure, challenge weak ideas, draft and revise copy, organize technical work, and keep a long project moving. The useful part is not asking AI to “make me a website.” The useful part is having an iterative partner that can work through one decision after another.

I still make the calls. AI helps me get to better calls faster.

GitHub became the source of truth.

Once the site moved into GitHub, every meaningful change had a home, a history, and a way back. That matters when a project starts moving quickly.

The main branch contains the source. A GitHub Actions workflow builds the static site and publishes the finished output to a dedicated deployment branch.

Astro keeps the public site simple.

The site is built as a static Astro project. That gives me structured source files, reusable layouts, and fast pages without needing a database just to display books, articles, and recommendations.

Hostinger handles the public hosting.

Hostinger pulls the built site from the deployment branch automatically. The practical result is straightforward: edit the source, commit it, let the build run, and the hosting layer receives the finished site.

What I would do again.

• Choose one source of truth early.
• Separate source files from deployment output.
• Settle the content architecture before polishing every card.
• Keep the main site useful and let specialized platforms handle checkout where they already do it well.
• Keep recommendations in their own clearly disclosed lane instead of turning every page into an affiliate wall.

What I would avoid.

I would avoid manually copying production files around, creating a separate brand for every subject, stuffing affiliate links into unrelated content, or rebuilding something just because a new tool appeared.

The point is not to use more tools. It is to make the tools disappear behind a workflow that works.