Build Your First Website With Claude Code

Ellie at Willa, Editorial lead, Willa · Published August 18, 2026 · Updated August 25, 2026

Carley Hart spent about $2,100 having her e-commerce website built and maintained by freelance developers. In her words, she kind of always hated it. This spring, she rebuilt it herself with Claude Code, with no technical background, and then joined us live at Willa's event "The Claude Code Starter Pack: Build Your First Website" to show exactly how she did it. Carley runs partnerships at Cornell Tech, Cornell University's New York City campus, co-founded AI Trailmates, runs the children's dental brand Brushing Buddies, and starts this August as a professor of entrepreneurship at NYU. She framed the session like a cooking show: we'd build a simple site together live, put the recipe in the oven, and then she'd show us the fully-baked websites she's spent months building. This guide walks through her whole process.

Why start with a website at all? "You can make something, you can look at the thing that you made, you can ship it. It's so easy, it's so fast," Carley said. "It was my on-ramp to Claude Code, and now I'm doing crazy stuff."

What do I need to start building a website with Claude Code?

Surprisingly little. Carley's starter list:

• A paid Claude account. Carley is on the $100/month Max plan because she builds far more than websites, but she was clear: "I think you could do everything I'm doing on the $20 a month one."
• Your terminal. On a Mac, press Command + Space, type "terminal," and it pops up. Paste in the Claude Code install command, and it opens your browser so you can sign in. You're just authenticating your terminal to access your Claude account. After that, starting a session is as easy as typing claude.
• Optionally, a voice-to-text tool. Carley uses Wispr Flow with hotkeys and barely types to Claude anymore. She noted the general consensus she's been hearing: voice-to-text is the best way to capture all the fine details of whatever you're trying to relay to your AI, because you say things you'd have edited out while typing.

If the terminal feels like too much on day one, that's fine. Carley breaks Claude into three modes: chat (the claude.com experience you already know), Cowork, and Code. The last two can control your computer. "Everything that Cowork can do, Code can do, plus many other things," she explained, calling Cowork a comfortable on-ramp if you've only ever chatted with AI. Her own trick for graduating to the terminal: she ran the terminal and the desktop app side by side for a week, doing things in the one she didn't understand and asking questions in the one she did.

How do I build my first website with Claude Code?

Carley's live demo started with one prompt, which she shared so everyone could follow along. Paraphrased lightly, it was: "Spin me up a quick About Me one-pager. Give me four genuinely different design directions, build each as its own page, and start a local server with a gallery so I can see all four of them in Chrome."

Here's what's actually happening, in her plain-English explanation. Claude is writing HTML files and saving them to your computer: the same files you would have paid a software engineer to write a couple of years ago. The "local server" part means the pages open at localhost in your browser: they're hosted only on your machine, like a sandbox, so you can look at your website and edit it live before anything touches the internet. Claude even opens Chrome for you, because it can control your desktop.

A few minutes later, Carley had four clickable design directions. She picked the scrapbook-style one and gave feedback the way she always does: conversationally. "I think about it as I'm talking to a person. I'm just talking to an assistant," she said. Her follow-up was simply: this looks awesome, I'm going with the scrapbook look, clean it up a little, finalize the HTML file, and download it to my Downloads folder.

Two honest caveats from her. First, iteration is normal: she couldn't count how many rounds her own sites took, whichever tool she used. Second, taste is the real work. Her Brushing Buddies redesign took roughly 35 hours over two weeks, mostly because she wanted it to feel handmade, with its own personality, rather than obviously AI-generated.

How do I get my website live on the internet?

This was the moment that demystified everything. Carley uses Netlify (Vercel is the popular alternative; she considers them essentially the same, and both have free tiers). In her Netlify account she clicked "Add new project," dragged her finished HTML file into the drop zone, hit deploy, and after a few seconds of thinking: "Now it's literally deployed on the internet."

The last piece is a domain name, which you buy separately (Carley has used GoDaddy for years but pointed to Namecheap as the cheapest option), and connecting it inside Netlify is straightforward.

Part of why this matters, she explained, is that it teaches you what a website actually is: a bundle of HTML and CSS files living in a folder somewhere, which a host deploys. Site builders like Wix and Squarespace are doing exactly this behind the curtain with pre-structured templates. Once you see that, the whole thing stops being magic. And when you're ready to level up, Netlify has a command line interface (CLI) you can connect to Claude Code, so you can just tell Claude to change something on a page and push it live for you, no dragging and dropping required.

What should I do when I get stuck?

Carley was refreshingly blunt that she got here by being confused, constantly. "I look like I'm fancy and using all this stuff. It's because I've spent hundreds of hours, probably, screenshotting stuff and being like, I don't understand this, I don't understand this," she said. Her method:

1. Screenshot whatever is confusing you (an error, an unfamiliar interface) and drag it into Claude. "The terminal just said this, and I don't understand it, I'm getting some sort of error. What do I click now?"
2. Let Claude navigate other tools for you. This is literally how she learned Netlify: she'd describe what she wanted to do, share her screen state, and Claude would tell her which button to click. The same approach got her comfortable with Supabase and SQL.
3. Ask for the next step, not the whole map. "I don't have a technical background. I started from being like, I want to build my personal website. Claude, what do I do? I don't understand that. Tell me what I do next."

Allison, Willa's founder, echoed this when the chat started feeling overwhelmed by the tool count: you don't need to learn every tool Carley mentioned before you start. "When you go in actually building, you will see what the next step is," she said. "Don't get overwhelmed."

Carley also shared the weekly rule that got her out of tutorial paralysis: every week, her projects have to move forward and her knowledge of AI has to move forward. Some weeks lean one way, some the other, but over a month it balances out, and she's always actually building.

Can Claude Code handle a real e-commerce website?

Yes. This is where the cooking-show reveal came in. Brushing Buddies, Carley's children's dental brand, runs on Shopify, and the original developer-built template cost her about $2,100 over time, with a couple hundred dollars more for every custom feature. Her Claude Code rebuild includes custom development work she'd never have attempted before, like a custom cart page with a "+$15 to double your order" upsell she designed to increase order sizes.

The breakthrough was the Shopify CLI, which came out in late April. Instead of logging into Shopify and digging through theme files, she now works entirely from her terminal: she asks Claude to spin up a localhost version of her store, makes changes there (swapping a photo on her dental practices page, say), and once she likes how it looks, types "commit and push" to send the new code live. She named Claude Design, which now stores the brand guidelines and design systems for all three of her brands, as the other big win that convinced her to keep the business.

One member asked why she stuck with Claude Code over a tool like Lovable. For Carley, it comes down to compounding: her Claude is connected to her notes, her projects, and everything she's built. "I just decided that I'm gonna be a Claude person, and everything's gonna be there," she said, the same way people once picked Mac or Windows.

Key takeaways

• A website is the best first Claude Code project: you can make something, see it, and ship it fast, and a $20/month Claude plan is enough.
• Your first prompt can be Carley's: ask for an About Me one-pager with four genuinely different design directions on a local server, then pick one and iterate conversationally.
• Going live is drag-and-drop: a free Netlify or Vercel account hosts your HTML file, and a domain from Namecheap or GoDaddy makes it yours.
• When you're confused, screenshot it and ask Claude "what do I click now?" That's how Carley, with no technical background, learned Netlify, Supabase, and SQL.
• Don't try to learn every tool up front. Build, get blocked, ask for the next step, and try to move both your projects and your AI knowledge forward each week.

If this session has you ready to go further, watch how a full app comes together with Claude, start to finish. And if you're watching your budget, most of Carley's hosting stack has free tiers, which pairs nicely with our guide to building an AI stack for $0.

Join us for the next one

This walkthrough came from a live Willa event, where members followed along in their own terminals, got unstuck in the chat in real time, and asked Carley everything from hosting questions to plan pricing. Willa hosts expert-led sessions like this almost every week for women building careers with AI. See what's coming up on our events page, or become a member and build your first website alongside a community that's figuring it out together.

• Claude Code
• website building
• Netlify
• AI tools
• beginners
• no-code

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