Build your website with Claude or another AI, then upload it

• Best forCustom-looking brochure and portfolio sites, fast
• DesignYour own design — the AI writes the code
• Time to a first siteAn afternoon to a few days
• CostFree or a monthly AI subscription
• SkillsClear writing and careful checking; basic file uploads

Is building with AI right for you?

Choose this route if you want a site that looks like yours and nobody else’s, and you’re happy to work through it carefully. It suits brochure sites, portfolios, landing pages and small business sites. The result is plain HTML and CSS files — the same kind of site as our page template — which are fast, secure and have nothing to keep updating.

Build it, step by step

1. Get your domain and hosting

Order an OnPoint plan with your domain — about 10 minutes. You’ll upload your finished site to it in step 7.

2. Write a brief

The better your description, the better the site. Before you open the AI, jot down: what the business does and for whom; the pages you need; what visitors should do (call, email, book); your colours, fonts or logo; two or three sites whose style you like; and your real contact details. Write your own text if you can — the AI can polish it.

3. Ask for the site

Open an AI assistant such as Claude and paste a request like this, filled in with your brief:

Please build a small website for my business as plain HTML and CSS files
that I can upload to cPanel hosting. No frameworks, no build tools.

About the business: [what you do, where, who for]
Pages: index.html (home), about.html, services.html, contact.html, privacy.html
Main goal: [e.g. get people to phone or email for a quote]
Style: [colours, fonts, feel — e.g. calm, modern, lots of white space]
Logo: [describe it, or say I'll add logo.svg]
Contact details: [phone, email, address]

Requirements:
- One shared stylesheet, css/style.css; mobile-first and responsive
- Accessible: proper headings, alt text, good colour contrast, keyboard friendly
- Each page with its own <title> and meta description, lang="en-GB"
- Fast: no unnecessary JavaScript, images in an images/ folder
- Give me each file in full, with its file name, and a list of the folders

Ask for one change at a time afterwards: “make the header sticky”, “add a testimonials section to the home page”, “the buttons need more contrast”. Many assistants can show a live preview of a page as you go.

4. Save the files and look at them

1. Make a folder on your computer called website, with css and images folders inside.

2. Save each file exactly as named — in a code editor such as Visual Studio Code, not Word. Add your own photos and logo to images.

3. Double-click index.html to open it in your browser. Click through every page and resize the window to see how it looks on a phone.

5. Check it properly

• Every fact — prices, opening times, phone number, address. AI fills gaps with plausible inventions.
• No placeholder text such as “Lorem ipsum”, “[Your name]” or made-up testimonials. Only publish reviews real customers gave you.
• Every link and button goes somewhere real, and phone numbers use tel: links.
• Images are yours or properly licensed, sized sensibly (under about 300 KB each) and have alt text.
• The basics from our SEO checklist: unique titles and descriptions, one <h1> per page, a privacy policy.
• Ask the AI to review its own work: “Check these files for broken links, accessibility problems and anything that won’t work on a phone.” Then check its fixes too.

6. Add a contact form — safely

A form needs a small PHP script on the server to send the email. You have two options:

• Simplest: no form — a clear email link and phone number. Nothing can go wrong and spammers can’t abuse it.
• A proper form: ask the AI for a PHP contact form that sends through a mailbox at your domain using SMTP (for example with PHPMailer), with a hidden honeypot field against spam, input checking, and the password kept in a file outside public_html. How website email should work.

7. Upload it to your hosting

Zip the contents of your website folder, upload the zip to public_html with cPanel’s File Manager and choose Extract — or drag the files across with FileZilla. Uploading your website, step by step

8. Finish the launch

Visit your address and check the padlock and every page on your phone. Then add a favicon, a sitemap and a robots.txt — the AI can write these too — and tell Google about your site with Search Console.

9. Making changes later

Your website folder is the master copy, so keep it backed up. To change something, open the file (or paste it into the AI with your request), save the new version, and upload just that file again. Keep the chat or a short notes file describing your design choices, so later changes stay consistent.

AI helps on every route

Even if you choose WordPress or Sitejet, an AI assistant is useful for drafting page text, writing alt text and meta descriptions, explaining an error message, or writing a snippet of custom CSS. And if you want to understand the code it writes, our 8-step guide explains every part.