Automating Blog Post Images with ChatGPT’s New Image Model + Notion + Zapier
Template for writing a blog post, including links to book a discovery call and message via WhatsApp.
Why We Ditched WordPress and Came Home to Bullet + Notion
An honest post‑mortem on our website journey (spoiler: simpler really is better).
The Ugly‑Duckling Phase: Bullet + Notion v1
When we first spun up work.flowers online, I chose the fastest route I could find: Notion pages embedded through Bullet. I loved how quickly I could hit “Publish” and get back to client work.
The problem?
Speed ≠ quality.
What’s Bullet?
Bullet.so is a minimal, no-code site builder that lets you turn Notion pages into a clean, fast-loading website. It handles SEO, theming, and custom domains - all without dragging you into a design rabbit hole.
- Design: I picked the first template that seemed decent without giving much thought to the overall look and feel I was trying to convey. It looked and felt… very much like a template
- Branding: Our new logo floated in space; the font stack screamed “intern project”.
- CTA hygiene: No clear “Book a call” button, no WhatsApp prompt - just text links buried mid‑paragraph.
It wasn’t just ugly - it felt amateur. That hurt, because our entire business is about professional automation and polish.
The Rebound: WordPress to the Rescue (or so we thought)
Fast forward to last month. We were officially now a team of two, and one of the first things we agreed on was that the site needed a makeover. So, like anyone who’s ever hated their site, we reached for the “real” tool: WordPress.
- Installed it on a Sunday, picked a slick theme, bolted on a page‑builder, added six plugins before my second coffee.
- By Wednesday the site looked great—crisp hero section, modern colour palette, shiny animations.
Then reality set in:
Friction Point | How It Bit Us |
Theme Bloat | 200+ options just to tweak a single heading size. |
Plugin Roulette | "Update all" broke styling twice in one week. |
Performance | Lighthouse score tanked below 50; page speed shamefully slow. |
Author Experience | Every blog post felt like filling out a tax return - too many sidebars and meta boxes. |
Complex Interface | Buried settings, cryptic menus, and confusing admin panels made simple tasks difficult. |
Yes, WordPress can do anything. But when you’re a lean agency, “anything” turns into wasted evenings fiddling with minutiae. We were spending more time maintaining the CMS than helping clients automate theirs.
Coming Home (Again): Bullet + Notion v2
So we swallowed our pride and went back to Bullet and Notion—armed with lessons learned and a new design reference lifted from our own WordPress mock‑up.
What changed?
- Put more time and thought into choosing our theme
- We spent some more time and picked out a theme template that was more consistent with the new look and feel that we had come up with when we moved to Wordpress
- Spent some time actually tweaking the template (Bullet has many customisation options) before rolling it out
- Applied our brand font Work Sans and star‑shaped flower logo consistently across every Notion block.
- Design guardrails, not handcuffs
- Limited colour and typography variables to a tiny palette.
- Result: on‑brand pages without fifty toggles per element.
- SEO & speed upgrades
- Lean embed code; zero unnecessary scripts.
- Used Notion AI to auto-populate meta descriptions and keyword tags - faster than Yoast, with none of the plugin overhead.
- Author happiness
- Writing inside Notion feels like, well, writing
- Publish is still one click; edits are instant
- No more battling with Gutenberg blocks or short‑codes
- All our content lives in one place, so we can leverage Notion AI’s excellent RAG to its fullest extent
Five Things We Learned (So You Don’t Have To)
- Start ugly—but iterate fast. An embarrassing v1 shipped is better than a pixel‑perfect plan stuck in Figma purgatory
- Tooling should serve content, not the other way round. If your CMS demands a weekend course to use, you picked the wrong CMS
- Design once, codify, then banish the palette. Guardrails free your brain for writing, not re‑styling
- Plugins = tech debt. Each one is a liability disguised as a feature - if you must add functionality, reach for low‑code embeds first
- Speed sells. Clients judge you on page load before they read a word. Our Notion‑powered pages out‑paced WordPress without breaking a sweat. We’re now loading in under 2.5s!
The Forward Path
Could we migrate again in the future? Maybe - if the trade‑offs change. For now, Bullet + Notion gives us:
- Focus: I spend nights crafting client automations, not debugging PHP
- Flexibility: Notion databases tie straight into our ops stack (Zapier, Attio, BigQuery)
- Consistency: Every blog post inherits the same blocks and CTA section - no rogue fonts slipping through
And yes, that CTA is right here:
Ready to automate your own business headaches?
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