This website
A static personal site with three sections: work-life for the product writing, life-life for personal interest, side-projects for the things I’ve built.
There’s no content management system behind it, no framework, and nothing that has to be installed or kept up to date. I built it myself rather than starting from a template, to learn how the pieces fit together.
How it’s built
It starts with a spec and ends at a live URL. Four tools in between:
- AI design tools — where you settle how it looks. The part with no obviously right answer.
- AI coding tools — turn the design into pages. You describe, review, correct, repeat.
- GitHub — connected once, then it keeps every version you save. Each save is a commit.
- Cloudflare — connected once to that repo. Free, and it sells you the domain too.
The top half of the diagram is the part you drive. The bottom half runs itself: once GitHub and Cloudflare are wired together, pushing a change is the deploy process. There’s no build step to configure and no server to manage.
The fork at the bottom is the part worth copying. Work on a branch and Cloudflare gives you a private preview link; merge to main and it goes live.
What it costs
Domain pricing varies by the name you pick — the extension matters more than anything (.com is cheap, .io and .dev less so), and short or in-demand names cost more again. Mine is at the low end.
Tips
- No toolchain cuts both ways. Nothing to maintain or keep current, but nothing is shared between pages either — so a change to the nav or the footer means touching every page it appears on.
- Write the design system down once the design has settled. I used Claude Design to work backwards from the finished pages into the colours, type and spacing the site had already arrived at. It doesn’t solve the copy-paste problem, but every new page starts from a stated reference instead of guesswork about what the last one did.