I know how to build a website. I’ve done it a bunch of different ways. But this is the first one that actually feels like it keeps up with me.
Quick context before I get into it: this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve spent serious time in Wix. I’ve lived inside the WordPress admin and wrestled with every page builder on the planet. I’ve hand-coded little HTML/CSS/JS sites from scratch, the old-school way. I’ve built some tiny robots in my day. The question can you actually build a website? has never been the interesting one for me.
The question I cared about for this site was different: what’s the best way to build a site that feels like a living thing, not a time capsule? Something that stays honest about what’s happening in my life this week instead of drifting into an outdated “about me” page I’m embarrassed to look at six months later.
And after trying a few approaches, the answer turned out to be: I don’t really touch it. I sit in a chair and describe what I want, and Claude does the wiring.
What Claude Code actually is
Claude Code is a little terminal app from Anthropic. You open it inside a project folder on your computer, and from there you just… talk to it. You tell it what you want; it reads files, writes new ones, runs commands, asks questions when it’s stuck. It’s the same Claude I already use for writing and thinking out loud — but in this mode, it has hands inside my repo.
So for markyana.com, I open Claude Code inside the folder where my theme lives, and every session starts with something very unprofessional like “the headers are too big on mobile” or “I made sourdough last night, put it on the homepage.”
And it goes and does it.
Why I didn’t want to live in the admin this time
I want to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with the WordPress admin. I’ve used it for years. But for this particular project — a personal site I want to actually keep current — it was fighting me more than helping me.
Every time I had an idea like “I’m really into this book right now, it should show on the homepage,” the distance between the idea and the site was too long. Open admin. Find the right page. Remember which plugin owns which field. Paste. Save. Preview. Uncheck the thing that broke. Save again. By the time the update was live, the impulse was gone.
Hand-coding had a different version of the same problem. I know HTML and CSS and enough JS to be dangerous — but that’s great for building a site and lousy for iterating on a living one. You don’t want to git commit every time you finish a book.
What I actually wanted was something that met me where I think, which is in sentences. Here’s what meeting me in sentences looks like in practice:
- “I made kimchi jjigae tonight, can that be on the homepage under ‘last cooked’?” → Claude drafts the update in my voice, shows it to me, I say yes, it’s live.
- “Make the hero photo a little rounder and warmer.” → one CSS tweak, committed, pushed, live in 30 seconds.
- “Add a reading block that only shows when I’m actually in the middle of a book.” → Claude wires up a new WordPress option, updates the homepage template, and it appears.
That’s the whole loop. The gap between having the thought and seeing it on the site is about as short as it gets. And that turns out to matter a lot when the point of the site is to stay current.
The “right now” idea — and why this workflow is what makes it possible
The thing I’m proudest of about this site: the homepage is a living mirror of what’s true in my life this week.
It’s a bento grid — a little block layout — and each block is something that’s happening right now. What I’m learning. What I last cooked. This week’s Bible verse. The book I’m in the middle of. A “current thing” block for whatever I’m obsessed with at the moment. When a block stops being true, it comes down.
Here’s the part that’s easy to miss: this idea only works if updating the site is cheap. If every block costs me fifteen minutes of admin clicks, the homepage goes stale in a week and the whole concept dies. The reason I can actually maintain a living site is that I’ve taken the friction almost to zero.
Claude even bugs me about it. At the start of every session it kind of takes stock: “Your ‘currently learning’ block still says A2 Korean from six weeks ago. Still accurate?” It’s like a friend keeping my space tidy. That’s not something I’d build a cron job for — but it’s something Claude just naturally does because I wrote it into the rules of the project.
The plumbing, in case you’re into this stuff
Since some of you will want this — the actual stack:
- WordPress, the real self-hosted kind, on a cheap Dreamhost shared plan
- A custom theme Claude and I built from scratch, file by file, in one long conversation. Warm rose garden palette, Instrument Serif for headings, Nunito for body, a bunch of CSS variables for the whole peach-rose-mint-cream vibe.
- The theme lives in a GitHub repo. Every push triggers a GitHub Action that rsyncs it to Dreamhost over SSH. Deploys take about 30 seconds.
- For content updates — new posts, new recipes, homepage blocks — Claude uses the WordPress REST API with an app password. Nothing ever needs me to open wp-admin.
- There’s a
CLAUDE.mdfile in the repo that explains the whole project: the voice rules, the URL structure, the content model, the homepage philosophy. Every new Claude session loads it first, so I don’t start from scratch every time. - For blog posts I added a
/posts/prefix to the permalink (this very post lives at/posts/building-my-website-with-claude-code/) so I can filter analytics cleanly later.
Nothing about this stack is exotic. What’s new is the interface to it.
What actually surprised me
Honestly? Two things.
First: how much of the creative work is still mine. I was a little worried I’d end up with a “default AI website” — you know the look. But because I kept describing specifics (“softer, warmer, the dusty rose a little less saturated, move that eyebrow closer to the title”), it kept pulling toward my taste. Claude is a very good collaborator but a pretty neutral one — it’s happy to build whatever you describe. If you’re specific, you get something that feels like you. If you’re vague, you get something that feels like a template. That’s on me, not on the tool.
Second: how much the friction mattered. I’d underestimated this before. Every previous site I built, I maintained for a few weeks and then let drift, and I blamed myself — “I’m just bad at keeping things updated.” Turns out I wasn’t bad at it. I was fighting tools that were built for someone with a totally different workflow than mine. The minute I switched to something where the distance between idea and live site was one sentence long, I couldn’t stop updating.
What’s next
I’m going to keep writing here. Recipes mostly — I have a list of Korean dishes I want to put up properly, with actual photos and stories. Some faith things. Occasional book notes when something really gets me. And every once in a while, a post like this one about how this whole thing is held together.
If you’re curious about any specific piece — the theme, the deploy setup, the CLAUDE.md file, the prompts I use, the way I’ve structured the “right now” blocks — tell me. I’d love to write the parts people actually want to know about.
For now, this is me, waving from a small pastel corner of the internet I built by talking.
— Yana