January 10, 2026

Building a Website in a Day with Claude Code

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For years, my writing has lived in scattered places: a few posts on Dev.to, drafts in Google Docs, notes in Notion, and ideas that never made it past a sticky note. I always wanted a simple personal site to bring it all together, but building and maintaining a website felt like one more thing on an already full plate.

Today, I finally did it, and the whole thing took less than a day.

The Catalyst

I had been curious about Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. On a whim, I asked it to help me scaffold a personal blog. What started as a quick experiment turned into a fully deployed website with:

  • A minimal design
  • A blog with posts grouped by year
  • An About page with my bio and speaking links
  • A “Favorites” page for quotes and recommendations
  • Automatic deployment to GitHub Pages
  • A custom domain with HTTPS

The Numbers

Here’s what it actually took:

  • 34 commits over the course of a day
  • ~2 hours of active work spread across the day (9:30 AM to 6:45 PM), with breaks for hanging out with family, laundry, and cooking dinner in between
  • 1 conversation with Claude Code that I could resume at any point
  • $0 hosting cost using GitHub Pages
  • $10/year for a custom domain (helps having a unique last name)

I don’t have exact token counts, but this was an iterative conversation. My rough estimate is somewhere between 100,000-200,000 tokens for the full session. At current Claude pricing, that’s probably $3-6 worth of AI assistance to build and deploy an entire website.

What Surprised Me

The iteration speed was remarkable. I could say “make the hero text smaller” or “use this image as my favicon” and see the change in seconds. When something didn’t look right, I just said so, and we fixed it together.

Context persistence mattered. I left for hours at a time, came back, and Claude remembered everything: the file structure, the design decisions, the GitHub setup. I didn’t have to re-explain anything.

It handled the boring parts. Setting up GitHub Actions for deployment, fixing package-lock.json issues, configuring the right base paths for GitHub Pages. All the tedious infrastructure work that usually derails side projects.

I stayed in control. Claude made suggestions, but I chose the colors, wrote the copy, and decided what felt right. It was collaborative, not autopilot.

What I Actually Built

The site runs on Astro with React components, styled with plain CSS. It’s fast, simple, and easy to maintain. When I want to add a new blog post, I just create a markdown file with some frontmatter.

I’m still migrating old articles from Dev.to and other places, but now my writing finally has a home.

Adding a Custom Domain

After getting the site live on GitHub Pages, I wanted a proper domain. I purchased thegoodoommen.com through Cloudflare for about $10/year. The setup process was straightforward:

  1. Buy the domain on Cloudflare
  2. Add DNS records pointing to GitHub’s servers (4 A records and 1 CNAME)
  3. Set the records to “DNS only” mode so GitHub can verify ownership
  4. Add the custom domain in GitHub Pages settings
  5. Wait a few minutes for GitHub to issue an SSL certificate
  6. Enable “Enforce HTTPS”

Claude walked me through each step, even running dig commands to verify DNS propagation before I configured GitHub. The whole process took about 15 minutes, most of which was waiting for the SSL certificate.

Making the Site Discoverable

Having a site is one thing. Having people find it is another. I asked Claude to help with SEO basics:

Adding a Sitemap

Astro has an official sitemap integration. Claude installed it and configured it in a few seconds:

npm install @astrojs/sitemap

After adding it to the Astro config, the build now automatically generates a sitemap at /sitemap-index.xml that search engines can crawl.

SEO Meta Tags

Claude updated my layout to include proper meta tags: description, author, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags, and Twitter card tags. These don’t add visible buttons, but they control how links appear when shared. Now when someone pastes a link to one of my posts on LinkedIn or Twitter, it shows a nice preview with the title, description, and image instead of just a bare URL.

Google Search Console

To get the site indexed by Google:

  1. Go to Google Search Console
  2. Add your domain as a property
  3. Verify ownership via DNS (add a TXT record in Cloudflare)
  4. Submit your sitemap (enter the full URL: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap-index.xml)

Google said it would take a day or two to process.

The Takeaway

This isn’t about AI replacing developers. I’ve been writing code for over two decades. What Claude did was remove the friction that kept me from starting. The setup, the config files, the deployment pipeline, the CSS tweaks. All the small annoyances that make side projects feel heavy.

Sometimes the best tool is the one that helps you finally ship the thing you’ve been putting off.

The site is live at thegoodoommen.com. The code is public. And for the first time in years, my writing has a home.