How I Built My First Website Using Claude
I’m not a developer. I run a clinic. I know nothing about code.
But I wanted a personal blog. Somewhere to document how I actually use AI tools in my day-to-day life. So I decided to build it myself, using AI to do the building.
This is what happened.
The idea
I own the domain insideai.in. It was just sitting there. I figured: if I’m going to write about AI, I should at least try to use it to build the thing I’m writing on.
The goal was simple. A clean personal blog. Bold design. Somewhere to publish once a week.
What I didn’t expect was that it would be live, fully functional, with a custom domain, newsletter signup, and comments. In a single day.
What I used
- Claude: did all the coding, planning, and decision-making
- Astro: the framework that runs the site (Claude picked it)
- Netlify: free hosting, connects directly to GitHub
- GitHub: stores the code, triggers automatic deploys
- Beehiiv: newsletter tool for subscriber signups
- Giscus: GitHub-powered comments on every article
Total cost: Rs. 0 per month. I already owned the domain.
How it actually worked
I opened Claude Code and described what I wanted. A personal blog. Bold design. Acid green accent colour. A terminal-style intro animation. A magazine-style homepage.
Claude asked me questions one at a time. Layout preferences, colour choices, whether I wanted comments or a newsletter. Then it wrote a full design spec. Then a step-by-step build plan. Then it executed that plan, task by task.
I didn’t write a single line of code.
What I did do: answer questions, copy-paste commands into Terminal, click buttons on GitHub and Netlify, and make decisions about how I wanted things to look.
That’s it. That was my job.
What took the longest
The code itself was the fast part. Claude generated everything in under two hours.
The slow part was the accounts.
Every service has its own setup flow. GitHub needs a personal access token. Netlify needs to be connected to GitHub. The domain DNS needs specific records pointed at Netlify’s servers. Beehiiv needs a form embed. Giscus needs the GitHub repo to be public and Discussions to be enabled.
None of this is hard. But each step is new if you’ve never done it before, and every screen looks slightly different from every tutorial you find online.
Claude walked me through all of it. Every screen, every setting, every step. When something didn’t match what it expected, I described what I was seeing and it adjusted.
The entire setup, including waiting for DNS to propagate, took about six hours.
What broke
Three things broke during the build.
The Tina CMS visual editor never completed its setup. Branch indexing failed silently. I spent an hour on it before accepting the workaround: write posts directly in the GitHub browser editor instead. It’s fine.
The article frontmatter got corrupted once when I edited through GitHub’s web interface. Astro’s schema validation threw a build error. The fix was finding the extra whitespace Claude had missed in the indentation.
The Netlify build command drifted. At some point the build settings in Netlify’s UI changed from what the project expected. Fixed with a netlify.toml file that locks it in place.
None of these were serious. All three were solved by describing the error to Claude and waiting.
What surprised me
The site looks genuinely good.
I was prepared for something functional but rough. What I got was a bold editorial design with a terminal animation intro, a proper homepage grid, tag filtering, and a dark/light mode that actually works.
The hardest creative decision was committing to the acid green (#A8FF00) accent colour. It felt aggressive in isolation. On the live site it feels intentional.
What’s live on the site
- Homepage with terminal-style intro animation
- Articles section with tag filtering
- Daily Log section for short entries
- About page
- Newsletter signup (Beehiiv) on every page
- Comments on article pages (Giscus)
- Privacy policy and terms pages
- Google Search Console verified
What this means
If you have an idea and Claude, you can build almost anything.
You need to be willing to follow instructions, answer questions, and not panic when something breaks.
Something always breaks. Claude fixes it.
The harder question isn’t whether you can build it. It’s whether you’ll keep writing once it’s live.
That part is still on you.
Want the step-by-step guide with every command, every setting, and every tool? Read the complete walkthrough here.
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