· 2 min read

How I built this website in one afternoon

Before this afternoon, I knew absolutely nothing about how to build a website… or about how to code. This is not a tutorial. It’s an invitation to try.

It started with a video

I watched this video by Cole Medin about AI workflows. The part that got me was the first few minutes - setting up Claude Code. It took about two minutes. Then I thought: what if I just ask it to build me a website?

How I actually built it

For those who want the short version:

  1. Install Claude Code
  2. Set it up in VS Code - the video walks you through it in the first few minutes
  3. Open it and describe what you want
  4. Let it ask you questions, answer them honestly
  5. Iterate - say what you like, what you don’t

Tech-wise, Claude suggested Astro as a framework and GitHub Pages for hosting. Both free. I didn’t know what either of those were before today.

That’s it. The rest is a conversation.

What surprised me

It asked me what I actually needed. I came in thinking I needed a CMS (a tool to manage content). Claude walked me through why I didn’t - I’m one person writing a blog, a simple text file is enough. It saved me from building something unnecessarily complex.

It explained everything. Not in a condescending way, but in a “here are your options, here’s what I’d recommend and why” way. I felt like I was making informed decisions, not blindly following instructions.

It generated an animation from scratch. I described a character - a farmer with a hay hat, blue overalls, a straw in his mouth, holding a pitchfork - and it drew it in pixel art and animated it walking across the screen. Just from a description. That blew my mind.

I understand websites now. Not in a “I can code one from scratch” way. But I understand what files do what, how pages are structured, how deployment works, how a blog post goes from a text file to a live page. I went from zero to genuinely understanding the mechanics in an afternoon.

The point

This post isn’t about the specific tools I used. It’s about the fact that the barrier to building things has completely changed. If you’ve ever wanted to make something on the internet and thought “I don’t know how” - you probably can now. You just need to start a conversation.