You're reading this on a website I built myself. No Wix subscription. No WordPress plugins. No web developer. Just me, two screens, and Claude Code — in a day.
Yes, this one. The site you're on right now. Every page, the blog, the booking page, the little chat bubble in the corner, the AI tools — all of it. Built by a change manager who can't code, in about as long as it takes to redo your Wix homepage for the fifth time.
First, the thing nobody says out loud about Wix and WordPress
They're fine. Honestly. For a lot of people they're the right answer. But here's what they quietly cost you:
- You pay rent on your own website — forever. Stop paying, it disappears.
- You're stuck inside their templates. Want something they didn't imagine? You can't have it, or it's a paid plugin, or a "premium" tier.
- The thing you actually want to change is always three menus deep and greyed out unless you upgrade.
- And it's still slow, and it still doesn't quite look like you.
I'd been there. I'd fiddled with builders for years. And the whole time, the thing I really wanted was a site that was genuinely mine — that I could change however I liked, that didn't charge me monthly to exist. I just assumed that meant hiring a developer.
It doesn't. Not anymore.
I'm not a developer. I'm a change manager.
I've spent 30 years in technology projects, 20 of them helping people through the systems nobody wanted to use. I've trained over 3,000 people on software that scared them. What I am not is a coder. I didn't do a bootcamp. I don't know what most of the buttons do.
What I do know how to do is have a conversation, think clearly about what I want, and follow a process. As it turns out, that's the actual skill now.
The setup: two screens and a repo
Here's the whole secret, and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Three things, working together:
That's it. The chat window is where I think out loud — "I want a blog, here's the vibe, here are my brand colours, what should the home page say?" It's a brilliant brainstorming partner that never gets tired of my questions.
Then Claude Code, running on my laptop, is the one that actually does the building. I tell it what we decided, and it writes the real files — the pages, the styling, the lot — right there on my machine. I can see it happen.
And GitHub quietly holds everything. Every version, safely saved, so nothing ever gets lost. It's also what puts the site live on the internet — for free. No monthly hosting bill.
How the day actually went
Morning was all chat. No building yet — just thinking. What pages do I need? What's the one thing I want people to do? What do I want it to feel like? I worked that out in conversation, the way I'd whiteboard with a colleague.
Afternoon, I moved to Claude Code and we built. Home page. Then the blog. Then the booking page. Each time I'd describe what I wanted in plain English, watch it appear, look at it, and say "smaller heading" or "make that pink" — and it would.
By the evening it was live on my own domain, with a padlock and everything.
I didn't write code. I made decisions, in plain English, and watched them become a real website.
Why this beats a website builder
A few things became obvious fast:
- You own it. The files are yours, sitting in your repo. No platform can hold them hostage or switch off your site.
- There's no monthly rent. GitHub hosts it free. The only thing it costs is the domain name.
- You can change literally anything. No "that's not available on your plan." If you can describe it, you can have it.
- It's fast and clean, because it's just your pages — not a heavy builder loading half the internet to show a paragraph.
The honest bit
I won't pretend every minute was smooth. The building was the easy, fun part. The fiddly part was the setup around it — getting GitHub sorted, pointing the domain at the right place, the bits that have nothing to do with how your site looks.
That's exactly the stuff I help people get through. It's the same thing I've done for 20 years, really — standing next to someone while they learn a new tool, so the scary part stops being scary.
If you're sick of paying rent on your own website
You don't need to be technical. You need a clear head, two screens, and someone to show you the ropes for the setup. The building itself? You'll be amazed how much of it is just deciding what you want and saying so.
That's what I teach in Build Made Simple — a live, hands-on session where you build something real, for your own business, during the session. Not a demo you watch. The actual thing.
