How I Built This Site With Zero Coding Experience

The Starting Point

I’m not a developer. My background is in business development, commercial strategy, and B2B partnerships. But I needed a professional website — one that I actually controlled, that loaded fast, ranked well on Google, and represented who I am today.

So I built it with AI.

Why Not Use a Website Builder?

I looked at Squarespace, Wix, WordPress. They’re fine tools. But I wanted:

Full control over the HTML, the SEO, the performance
No monthly fees beyond hosting (which is free on Vercel)
A real learning experience — not just dragging blocks around
Speed — static HTML loads in milliseconds, not seconds

The Stack

Here’s what powers this site:

Claude Code — AI pair programmer that writes and edits code via the terminal
Astro — generates static HTML pages (no JavaScript shipped to the browser unless needed)
Tailwind CSS — utility-first styling that keeps design consistent
React — used sparingly for interactive components (mobile nav, timeline)
Vercel — free hosting with automatic deployments from GitHub

The Process

The entire site was built through conversation. I described what I wanted, Claude Code wrote the code, and we iterated together. No copy-pasting from Stack Overflow. No YouTube tutorials. Just a clear idea of what the site should look and feel like, and an AI that could translate that into working code.

The key insight: you don’t need to know how to code to direct an AI that does. You need to know what you want, why you want it, and how to evaluate whether the result is good.

What’s Next

This blog is where I’ll document the full process — the architecture decisions, the mistakes, the things that surprised me. If you’re a non-technical person thinking about building something with AI tools, this series is for you.