I’ve built websites for a living for most of my adult life. Client sites, my own sites, redesigns of redesigns. And the whole time the deal never changed: you either learned to code or you paid someone like me. That was the wall. My invoice lived on that wall for a lot of years.
It’s gone now. Mostly.
A couple weeks ago I sat down and built a complete membership website. Custom design, custom WordPress theme, shopping cart, email automation, a members area, all of it. I did not write one line of the code. What I did was talk. I use a voice-to-text tool called Wispr Flow, so I would literally just say what I wanted, look at what came back, tell it what was wrong, and go again. Some fixes took two minutes. One bug took three rounds and a screenshot before the AI understood what I was even looking at.
I filmed the whole thing and put it on YouTube for free. It runs about two and a half hours. There are chapter markers, so you don’t have to watch it straight through. Jump to the part you’re stuck on, come back for the rest whenever. The tools I used are all linked in the description.
Watch it here:
Some thinking behind the build, because the tool choices matter more than people assume.
I could have let Claude Code spit out a static HTML site. Would have been done in an afternoon, would have looked great. It also would have been a trap. Every future edit on a static site, a headline, a price, a typo, means going back to the AI, having it edit files, and pushing them live (for most anyway. I can edit the code myself, but do I want to?). You end up owning a website you can’t touch. So instead I had Claude Code build a custom WordPress theme. The AI wrote the code once. Now I update content from the WordPress admin the way I have for ages, and no AI is involved in changing a headline. WordPress doesn’t box you in either. Whatever you decide to bolt on two years from now, somebody has already built a plugin for it and supports it. A static site can’t say that.
The plugins are where it turns into an actual business. FluentCart handles ecommerce, so the site can sell products, services, or access. FluentCRM runs my whole email list and the marketing automation from inside the website, which is normally a monthly Mailchimp bill. FluentForms covers contact and waitlist forms with a drag and drop builder, although half the time I just told Claude Code to build the form for me. And FluentCommunity is a course platform plus an online community, the thing Circle and Skool charge for every month, sitting on a site I own outright. I have a thing about monthly fees. It shows up in everything I build.
Fair warning about the word easy, though. The AI wrote every line, but I made every call, and I caught every bug, and there were bugs. There’s a stretch in the video where a submit button renders bright blue. Bright blue, on a black and white website. The form plugin’s stylesheet was beating my theme’s styles and Claude Code had no idea until I pasted the actual page code in front of it. You have to look at what it builds. You have to check. That part is still yours. But that was always the part you could do. The typing was the wall, and the typing is what got free.
So if there’s something you’ve wanted to build for years and the honest reason you haven’t is code, that reason is gone. Watch the build, steal whatever is useful to you, and go make your thing.
~Jerad