Good morning.
Mike Huber and I go back many years. When he sent me two live websites he had just built with Claude, one for his brother and one for a longtime friend, I knew I had to share it. Several readers have been asking whether this is actually possible without coding experience or hiring anyone. Here is your answer.
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AI TUTORIAL
How to Build a Real Website With AI — No Coding Required
My friend Mike Huber has been retired for about a year. Last week, he sent me something I wasn't expecting.
Two live websites. Built in a single workday. His only tool was Claude.
Several readers have written recently asking whether it's actually possible to build a real website with AI — without a developer, without a website builder, without knowing a line of code. Mike's projects landed in my inbox at exactly the right moment. The timing was too good not to share.
Mike spent years working in digital marketing. He has built a few WordPress sites over the years and understands the web at a general level. But he is not a developer. He does not write code. And between a Thursday morning and a Friday afternoon, he built two complete, polished, live websites — one for his brother, one for a longtime friend — without charging either of them a dollar.
Both sites are live right now: Wild West Custom Pools and American West Advisory. Go look at them. Then come back and follow these steps.
Step 1: Decide on hosting before you open Claude
One setup task has nothing to do with AI — and skipping it will cost you time later. You need somewhere to put the website once Claude builds it.
If you are revamping an existing site, your hosting may already be in place. Mike's Wild West project ran on BlueHost. Switching from the old WordPress site to the new HTML site took about 15 minutes — delete the old files, upload the new ones, done.
If you are starting from scratch, Netlify is the recommendation here. It is inexpensive, has a free tier, and is built for exactly this kind of static HTML site. Setup took Mike under 30 minutes for the American West Advisory project.
Pick one before you start. Have your login credentials ready.
Step 2: Open Claude and write your business brief
Do not think about this as writing a prompt. Think of it as briefing a contractor who has never met you and knows nothing about your business.
Here is exactly how Mike opened for the Wild West Custom Pools project:
"The owners of this business want to move away from just being a pool builder to a more boutique builder doing only 10-12 pools a year that are totally customized, targeted to high net-worth individuals with white-glove hands-on care throughout the process. Can you look at other pool builders in their area in Austin, Round Rock, Hutto, and Pflugerville, Texas? I'd like to come up with an HTML website that generates leads. Before you start, what questions do you have to make this process smooth and fast with fewer revisions?"
That last sentence is the most important part of this step. Asking Claude its questions upfront — before any code gets written — saved Mike hours of back-and-forth later. Use it every time.
Step 3: Add the emotional context
A good website does not just describe a business. It speaks to what the customer is afraid of before they even walk in the door.
After the initial brief, Mike gave Claude this:
"You've heard the stories from your neighbors. The pool company that didn't show up. The permits that took forever. The work done incorrectly. Wild West Custom Pools doesn't work that way. You don't submit a ticket — you can call the owner directly, because you will have his phone number. Your frustration mounts before a shovel is even in the ground. That's the feeling this site needs to address."
Claude came back and pointed out that no competitor in the Austin market was owning the "owner on-site, only 12 pools a year" angle. Then it built the whole site around that insight. Mike was not expecting a strategist. He got one anyway.
Step 4: Build and iterate in plain English
From this point forward, the process is entirely conversational. Mike never typed a single line of code — not once. His instructions sounded like this:
"Move that section up."
"Make the headline bigger."
"That photo looks like a hotel lobby — find something more residential."
Claude found the exact lines to change and updated them. The closest Mike ever got to anything technical was being told to save a photo as dan.jpg and drop it in a folder.
One small detail worth knowing: the owner of Wild West originally had a photo taken wearing a Yankees cap. Mike used ChatGPT to swap it for a photo in a Stetson. Because if you're selling luxury pools in Texas, the hat matters.
Before and after: the same photo, edited with ChatGPT. The hat on the left didn't make the cut. The one on the right did.
Step 5: Gather your photos before you start — not during
This is Mike's biggest piece of advice, and it comes from experience. He collected photos along the way on both projects. Every new image required Claude to rebalance the layout around it, which added revision rounds that could have been avoided.
Gather everything before your first prompt: owner or team photos, location shots, any visuals you want on the site. Drop them all in one folder first. Your project will move faster and the layout will hold together better from the start.
Step 6: Budget extra time for the contact form
Every other part of both sites went smoothly. The contact forms did not.
Getting form submissions to route to the right email address required several rounds of troubleshooting on both projects. Claude handled every fix — it wrote a PHP file for the Wild West site, adjusted redirect paths, and walked through why emails weren't arriving. No understanding of PHP required. But the back-and-forth took time.
If you are building a lead-generation site, budget an extra hour or two just for this step. It is solvable. It just takes patience.
Step 7: Register with Google Search Console — do not skip this
A new website that Google doesn't know about is like a business with no sign out front. Google Search Console is free and takes about 10 minutes.
Sign in with your Google account and add your site using the URL prefix option. Google will ask you to verify ownership with a small HTML snippet — paste that snippet into Claude and ask it to add it to your homepage. Done in seconds.
Then ask Claude to generate a sitemap.xml file. Upload it to your site so it lives at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, then submit that URL in the Sitemaps section. Finally, use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for your homepage.
Ten minutes. The difference between a site that builds search presence from day one and one that sits quietly in the dark.
Want to try this yourself?
Start with this prompt — adapt the brackets to your situation:
"I want to build an HTML website for [describe your business or purpose]. The goal is to [generate leads / share information / promote services]. Before you start writing any code, what questions do you have to make this process smooth and fast with fewer revisions?"
Answer Claude's questions as if you are briefing a contractor who has never heard of your business. The more specific you are, the better the first draft will be.
A digital marketing agency would have taken weeks to deliver what Mike built in a day. He did it as a favor for two people he cares about, with a tool anyone can access.
That is not a small thing.
This week: visit both sites, write your brief, and ask Claude what questions it has. You do not need to know what HTML stands for to make this work.
READER POLL
Have you ever tried to build a website?
WHERE TO GO NEXT
More on this topic, from sources worth your time:
What Is an AI Prompt? The foundational skill that makes every Claude project — including building a website — faster and produce better results on the first try.
Netlify: Deploy Your First Site Step-by-step walkthrough for getting your new HTML site live on Netlify, including custom domain setup.
Google Search Console Help: Submit a Sitemap Official instructions for submitting your sitemap and requesting indexing after your site goes live.
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