Why I did it
I was trying freelancing for the first time, and I wanted a place of my own on the internet to keep everything and meet potential clients.
The "easy website builders" weren't very appealing, and I'm always looking for fun projects to build things with AI, so this website was the perfect excuse.
The tools
The first draft was built almost entirely with Gemini, working inside VS Code with a live HTML preview. Claude built a few specific things, like the hidden Flappy Bird game (click the banner in the case studies screen!). Lately DeepSeek has been used for just about everything.
For this type of project the LLM doesn't seem to matter so much, HTML is something they perform really well with..
The method
The original idea came from loose conversations while walking the dog or exercising: asking what's possible, what are the constraints, how do websites actually work?. From that conversation, I asked for a detailed prompt we could hand over to a new agent to generate the HTML. In Visual Studio it is easy to preview HTML live, describe what doesn't look or feel right, then iteratively work back and forth until you're happy.
The style eventually gets locked in for the home page, then that becomes the style guide for any new pages that get created.
It was shocking to me how easy it was to produce something real.. I am still not over the days of geocities, customisable neopets pages or myspace, so it was quite thrilling to start carving out my own domain again..
The fun bits
I have always admired people who can code, or create things on the computer, so it is still incredible to me that AI lets me take an abstract idea and make it real. So we took some of those ideas and scattered them as easter eggs around the website, like a headline that glitches apart when you click it, and a secret terminal page with a mini-puzzle and secret commands.
I hid them because I didn't want to distract from the point of the website, and it was amusing to me that if anyone did ever find them, they'd be appreciated more than if they're just laid out on the home page.
Little flourishes like the contact form that types like a terminal, you just get an idea and tell the AI what you're after, describing how it should feel, then after a few rounds of testing it's there.
The cost
The first draft, which included the home page and contact form, took about four to six hours and cost nothing. Simply by using free credits and waiting for tokens to refresh.
It took more days than necessary, but I am a bit of a cheapskate, you could do it for well under $5 with DeepSeek, or around $20 with Claude Sonnet.
The hard part
Surprisingly, building things was incredibly easy. The harder parts are coming up with original ideas (asking an AI for fun/original ideas to stand out and you'll get things everyone has spoken about online already). Harder than that is getting people to actually visit the website.
The best thing is learning, there are so many challenges, errors and concepts to explore when throwing yourself at a project like this. There are so many things that are obvious to so many people, but when I started out I was manually dragging and dropping the folder into Cloudflare every time I wanted to update the website. Then I kept hearing about GitHub, asked AI about it, and the auto-deploy pipeline became the natural next step. That's the real benefit of working this way: you keep encountering things you'd never normally come across. You might not learn to code exactly, but you become a reasonable generalist with a broad, useful knowledge.
The lesson
If you have an idea for a website, or even a small thing that would sit on a web page, just go for it! You can start for practically free: download VS Code, plug in whatever AI you like, get our robot friend a few HTML files, and preview them locally. No domain or hosting, just pure experimentation.
Build little things, build an old app or game that's useful to you but with your own spin on it. Be as weird as you like: an ARG, a choose-your-own-adventure, whatever. It feels more and more like the old-school, hand-crafted internet, and it's a wonderful way to get comfortable with what AI is capable of producing.
If you've been wondering whether this is possible and want to get started, please take this as a sign to take the first steps.
If you want to build something of your own or have any ideas you want to share, I'd love to hear about it! [email protected].