How to Build a Custom Website with Claude GitHub Vercel and Squarespace
A complete step by step guide to building and deploying your own website from scratch using AI. No coding experience required.
Published 2026-03-30
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A complete step by step guide to building and deploying your own website from scratch using AI. No coding experience required.
You used to need a crash course in hosting, git, and CSS just to get a personal site live. I built mine the old-fashioned way. These days you can wire up a custom domain, a GitHub repo, and a Vercel deploy with Claude Code and Cowork for roughly the price of the domain.
Before you begin: Mac, Google Chrome, and a paid Claude account for Claude Code and Cowork.
Estimated Time: About 45 minutes
I get asked this all the time: how do non-engineers own a real site without getting trapped in a template or taking a bootcamp. This is exactly how I'd walk a friend through it. Mac, Chrome, paid Claude. About 45 minutes if DNS cooperates.
Reserve a URL people can type (nathanfennel.com is mine). A .com is usually ~$20/year. Cheaper first-year promos exist; I still push people toward FirstnameLastname.com when it's available. Boring, professional, still true in ten years.
Head to Squarespace Domains and buy the name you want.
GitHub stores your site's code online. Most of the internet's side projects live there for free.
Your Mac needs to talk to that account. We'll use Terminal.
Open Spotlight (Cmd + Space), type "Terminal", hit Enter.
Run these one at a time:
brew install gh
gh auth login
mkdir -p ~/Documents/GitHub
cd ~/Documents/GitHub
~/Documents/GitHub/ for the same reason.Vercel hosts the site. The free tier is plenty for a personal site.
Do not use Claude Cowork to sign into Vercel, GitHub, or Squarespace. Cowork is great after you are logged in. Typing passwords through an agent is how accounts get leaked. Sign in yourself, then hand Cowork the boring integration work.
Have Claude scaffold something tiny in ~/Documents/GitHub/ so you can connect GitHub and Vercel before touching design.
Open the Claude Desktop App, go to the Code tab, and paste:
"Create a new website project in
~/Documents/GitHub/. Make a simple starter page that says 'Under Construction while we build something awesome' so we can wire everything up. Then commit to git, create a new private GitHub repo, push it, create a README, commit, and push again."
Give it a couple of minutes. At this stage, you want a repo on GitHub and a folder on disk, not a masterpiece.
Open Claude Cowork and select your project folder, e.g. ~/Documents/GitHub/YourWebsiteName/.
Paste:
"Create a new Vercel project from the GitHub repo we just made. Deploy it, show me the deployed site, then connect the Squarespace domain I bought so it points to this Vercel project."
DNS propagation is the part nobody warns you about. Sometimes it's minutes. Sometimes it's hours before yourname.com shows the Vercel build. The deploy can work while the domain still looks dead. Wait, refresh, don't panic-reprompt.
While DNS does its thing, start a new Claude chat (not Code) and figure out what you're actually building.
"Help me figure out what this site should be. Ask me one question at a time about my interests, goals, and who this site is for. After we finish, give me one strong prompt I can paste into Claude Code to build the content."
Answer the questions. Take the prompt it gives you back to the Code tab and let Claude Code fill in pages.
Content can land while you tune the look. Install Anthropic's Website Design skill:
"Please install the Website Design skill from Anthropic."
Find one or two sites you like and be specific:
"Use the Website Design skill to design my site. I like [Insert Website URL 1] and [Insert Website URL 2]. Pull inspiration from both, but give my site its own character."
Back in Claude Code:
"Please set up a 'Blog' section on my website so I can start publishing articles."
Optional, but this is the part that stuck for me. A Cowork routine can draft from your idea list and push to GitHub so Vercel redeploys.
"Create a routine that watches my blog idea list and drafts a post when I add a new idea. Keep the writing human. Then commit and push so the site republishes automatically."
You still edit what ships. The routine just removes the "open laptop, remember git, forget for three weeks" cycle.
You still pay yearly for the domain. Everything else in this stack was free when I wrote this. If you ship your site with this flow, I want to see it.