Build a Website With Claude

On 17 April 2026 I ran the monthly Leanpreneur Community workshop on building a business website from scratch with Claude. No design agency. No developer. No Wix. A handful of tools, a clear brief, and an operator willing to sit with their own business for an afternoon.

Barbara, one of the founding members, brought her new safeguarding consultancy into the session with nothing but a domain name and a set of notes. By the end of the call she had a live site, a working deploy pipeline, and more clarity on her offer than most brands buy from a five-figure agency engagement. That is the kind of compression this stack enables when the operator is the one driving.

This note is the public recap. The deck sits behind it for anyone who wants the slide-by-slide. The full written playbook, the affiliate stack, and the follow-up sessions sit inside the community.

The Deck

Sixteen slides, designed to be walked through in 90 minutes with the build happening live alongside. You can open it full-screen below or browse it inside this page.

Open in full screen →

Why Operators Should Own Their Website

The reason this workshop exists is that most solo operators still treat their website like a capital project. They brief an agency, pay four or five figures, wait six weeks, get a site they cannot edit without raising a ticket, and watch the thing drift out of date within a quarter. The cost is never just the invoice. It is the loss of agency. Your website is your business in public. If you cannot change it in an afternoon, you do not really own it.

A Leanpreneur stack inverts that. You write the copy yourself, because you are the closest person to the business. Claude helps you shape it, stress-test it, and turn it into clean code. A static host deploys it in seconds. A domain you already control points at it. When the offer changes, you edit a file and ship. The site becomes a living asset, not a frozen artefact.

What We Actually Built

The workshop moved through five stages, each one roughly fifteen minutes with a short demo. The brief came first, then the structure, then the copy, then the build, then the deploy. The slides walk through each step in order.

Brief. Before touching a tool, Barbara sat with Claude and talked through who the site was for, what action she wanted a visitor to take, and what she was not willing to say. The brief is the most important part of the process. Everything downstream compounds whatever decision gets made here, for better or worse.

Structure. Once the brief was clear, Claude sketched the page architecture. One page, five sections, a clear call to action. Anything more elaborate would have been theatre. Small businesses do not need complex sitemaps. They need a page that does one job well.

Copy. The copy came from Barbara, edited by Claude, stress-tested back and forth. Claude is very good at suggesting language. It is not very good at knowing what an operator actually means to say. The workflow that works is operator drafts, Claude sharpens, operator approves.

Build. Claude wrote a static HTML site and dropped it into a GitHub repo. No frameworks, no build system, no unnecessary moving parts. A site like this is roughly three hundred lines of code. You can read it end to end in ten minutes and change anything you want.

Deploy. A Vercel account linked to the GitHub repo deploys on every push. The custom domain points at Vercel via two DNS records. Total cost of infrastructure: zero pounds a month on the free tiers. Total time to push a change: about thirty seconds.

The Moment Worth Replaying

Halfway through the session Jo Reid asked, out loud, whether I would run a course specifically on this. Before I could answer, Martin Punter said he would pay for it. On the call. In front of everyone. No course exists yet. The demand was visible in real time because the people in the room were close enough to the problem to recognise the shape of the solution.

This is what a paid community does when it is working. It creates a room where signal is louder than noise, where operators tell each other what they need, and where the next product is usually half-built before anyone has written a line of copy for it.

The Playbook for the Community

The long-form version of this workshop, the step-by-step playbook, the affiliate links for each tool in the stack, and the recording are inside the Leanpreneur Community. The community is where the work happens. The public page you are reading now is the trailer.

If you are running a lean business and want the room where these sessions happen every month, along with the bi-weekly show-and-tells, the office hours, and the archive of everything we have built together, the door is here.