I’m Not a Developer. Here’s the Website I Built Anyway.
How I gave Claude Code a brief, stood on one leg, and came back to a working site
Every website I’ve tried to build over the last couple of years has ended the same way.
A WordPress theme. A page builder. A drag-and-drop editor that promised to make it simple. Weeks of fighting with blocks that wouldn’t align, columns that broke on mobile, and settings buried three menus deep that I could never find twice.
Eventually I’d give up. Not because the idea was wrong. Because the tools kept getting in the way.
I’ve been through that cycle enough times that I stopped trying. A website I couldn’t build in a reasonable amount of time was a website I didn’t have.
Then I built fourhourfreedom.com in 20 minutes. During my rehab.
The brief
I’m writing a book. It’s aimed at the same people this newsletter is for - solopreneurs who want a real business without giving their lives over to it - and it should be published next month.
The book needed a home. Not a placeholder page but a proper site with real value.
The tool I used was Claude Code - Anthropic’s coding agent. The same Claude, but built to write, run and deploy code rather than just answer questions.
I gave it four things.
First, a brief: what the site needed to do, who it was for, what it should feel like. I described the newsletter, the audience, the book coming next month, the tone - direct, no hype, built for solopreneurs who want real answers rather than inspiration. There was no technical specification - just the same brief I’d give a designer or a copywriter.
Second, I attached the front cover of the book. It was uploaded directly, so Claude had the visual direction - the colours, the feel, something to anchor the branding around.
Third, a link to the Google Doc where the book content lives. The language, the framing, the way I talk about the problem the book addresses. Claude read it and used it.
Lastly, I included some sites I liked the layout of. They weren’t necessarily in the same market as me, but I didn’t want the website to be a typical “Claude website.”
The prompt I used was:
I want to create a website for the FHF book but I want it to be bespoke so that it is lees obviously built by AI.
I’ve found other templates I like. Obviously, the imagery and the content is wrong, but hopefully the structure and layout of the sites will show what I’m after:
* Website 1
* Website 2
* Website 3
* Website 4
* Website 5
You can find the book at *Google Docs link* and a summary of the chapters in Tana. Please brand the website similarly to my book cover design (which I have attached).
If you have any questions, then ask me one at a time.
That was the input. Then I went to do my rehab.
Standing on one leg
My rehab right now is balance work. Standing on one leg to rebuild the leg strength lost after my stroke - the kind of unglamorous, incremental work that stroke recovery actually looks like.
The goal is to eventually walk without a stick. It’s slow work but you get there one rep at a time.
I stood on one leg. Switched. Stood on the other leg. Did the set … and came back to a website.
What it built
The website I came back to was not a template with placeholder text nor a blank page with a header.
It was a real site - homepage, navigation, structured sections, copy that reflected the book’s language and tone. Claude had read the Google Doc and understood what Four Hour Freedom actually was - the three-year track record, the constraint I work under, who the book is for. It had also pulled colours and visual direction from the front cover.
In short, the site looked like it belonged to the brand.
It had structured the content the way I’d have structured it myself - the newsletter and its framework front and centre, reader testimonials, a clean subscription flow into Substack, and space for the book when it’s ready.
It is about 80% of where it needs to be. I like to do the writing myself, so the remaining 20% depends on the book being finished - the full product pages, the complete archive, the parts of the story that aren’t written yet. Everything that could be built from what I provided, had been.
It’s perfectly presentable right now, though and would be fit for purpose if the book was to be published tomorrow. The site was live on a real domain before the session ended.
GitHub and Vercel
I had heard of GitHub and Vercel. I had assumed they were for people who understood what they were doing.
GitHub is where code is stored and version-controlled - think of it as the filing system behind the website.
Vercel is the platform that takes that code and publishes it as a live site: fast, on a proper domain, without needing to manage hosting. I’ve used it to host reporting dashboards that I’ve written about in previous articles.
Between them, they’re the infrastructure behind a large number of modern websites.
All I had to do was register for accounts for both services - the free tiers are enough for me!
Claude Code set up the GitHub repository. It then connected it to Vercel and walked me through the steps that required my input - logging in, confirming a permission, pointing the domain - and handled everything else itself.
When I needed to do something, it told me clearly: go here, click this, confirm that. When I didn’t need to do something, it just did it.
I didn’t understand most of what was happening beneath it. I still don’t, not fully. But the steps I needed to take were clear. The steps I didn’t need to take, I didn’t.
The site went live within half an hour. It loads fast, works on mobile and is secure by default. None of that required me to know what any of those things meant to configure.
What this means for the WordPress years
I’ve spent weeks on WordPress builds that never went live. Those sites that did go live, I wasn’t happy with.
I knew what I wanted. I could describe it. The drag-and-drop editors kept defeating me - every visual change required three decisions about settings I didn’t understand, every update risked breaking something I’d just fixed, and what I saw in the editor rarely matched what appeared on the live site.
The brief I gave Claude Code took five minutes to write. The site was live before I’d finished my physio set.
I’m not claiming every website project works this cleanly. The 20% still outstanding will take longer - it depends on content that doesn’t exist yet. But the structural build (the deployment, the domain setup, the branding) was done in one session, by someone who has never written a line of code, whilst standing on one leg.
The book will be out next month. The website that Claude built is at fourhourfreedom.com.
I used to spend weeks of trying and multiple WordPress attempts when I wanted to get a website live. I would eventually give up.
Then, I built one with Claude in twenty minutes, standing on one leg. The tools have changed.
And finally …
Four Hour Freedom is a newsletter about building sustainable work around your life. If this was useful , I’d love it if you subscribed to the newsletter.
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Did the same thing. Claude Code is ridiculously helpful compared to Wordpress.