The thing most people get wrong about teaching someone to build a website is that they start with tools. Here is the interface. Here is the button. Here is what happens when you click it.
I start with the problem.
What is the actual thing standing between you and having a website you are proud of? For most small business owners in the GTA, it is not a lack of skill. It is a combination of time, intimidation, and a vague sense that building a website is something other people do — designers, developers, people who spent years learning it.
That assumption is out of date.
What the workshop actually looks like
The Zero to Live workshop runs in the morning, typically 9am to 1pm, in Newmarket or Aurora. There are never more than 10 people in the room.
The first 20 minutes are framing. Not technical setup — framing. I want everyone to understand what we are doing before we start doing it: we are going to describe your business in plain English, to an AI that will turn that description into a working website. Claude is the tool we use. You do not need to understand how it works internally. You just need to learn how to talk to it.
Then we start building.
Each person opens Claude — in a browser, no installation required — and starts a conversation. The prompt I give them as a starting point is simple:
“I want to build a website for my business. It is called [name]. I [describe what you do] for [who your customers are] in [your city]. My tone is [professional / friendly / approachable]. Help me write a homepage that introduces my business and encourages visitors to contact me.”
Within a few minutes, everyone has a homepage draft. It is not always right. The copy might be a bit generic. The structure might not quite match what they had in mind. That is fine — and that is the teaching moment.
The real skill is feedback, not prompting
People assume the hard part of AI-assisted building is writing the right prompt. It is not. The first prompt gets you something reasonable. The hard part is knowing what to do with the response.
This is what I spend the most time on in the workshop: how to give feedback to Claude so it revises toward what you actually want, not what it guessed you wanted.
That means learning to be specific. Instead of saying “make it better,” you say “make the opening line more direct — I want a visitor to know within five seconds what I do and who it is for.” Instead of saying “the about section does not feel right,” you say “the about section sounds corporate. I want it to sound like I am a person, not a brand. Here is a bit about my background: [background].”
This is a skill. And it transfers. Once you understand how to direct Claude on your website, you can use it for everything else — email copy, social posts, service descriptions, FAQ answers.
Why Claude for website design beats a drag-and-drop builder
I am not against Squarespace or Wix. They serve a real need and they are better than nothing. But they have a structural problem for small business owners: they give you a template, and you are never quite in control.
You are dragging content into boxes someone else designed. The spacing is off and you cannot fix it without paying for a higher tier. You want to add a section the template does not support and you are stuck. You want to change the font and suddenly everything breaks.
More importantly: you have no idea why things look the way they look. You just know they do. And when something goes wrong, or you want to make a meaningful change, you are starting from zero.
When you build with Claude, you are working with actual code. Real HTML and CSS, in a structure you can see and understand. It is not magic. And because you built it — even if Claude did the heavy lifting — you know where things are. You know what to change. You have the skills to go back and update it.
There is also a practical consideration. The site you build in this workshop costs nothing to host at the scale a small business needs. Netlify’s free tier handles thousands of visitors a month without a cent. Squarespace starts at $16 per month and goes up. Over three years, that is $576 you have not spent, on a platform you do not own.
Claude vs. other AI website tools
Several AI website generators exist now — Wix ADI, Squarespace Blueprint, Jimdo Dolphin, and others. They work like a vending machine: answer a few questions, get a template with your content poured in. You did not design it. You made no decisions. You got an output.
Claude for website development is different. There is no template. You start with a conversation, Claude generates real code, and you stay in the loop at every step. The site that comes out reflects your actual business — not the nearest preset.
For anyone exploring Claude for website creation more broadly: it works best when you are willing to have a real back-and-forth. The first output is rarely the final one. Learning to give good feedback is the actual skill, and it transfers to every other task you use Claude for.
What people build
In the sessions I have run so far, people have walked out with:
A photography portfolio for a Newmarket wedding photographer who had been meaning to build a site for two years and could not justify $4,000 for a designer.
A services page for a Barrie-based massage therapist who needed people to be able to find her on Google and book an appointment.
A landing page for an Aurora entrepreneur launching a consulting practice who wanted something up before she started networking.
None of these people had any web background. The photographer could barely navigate her email settings. All of them left with a live site.
What you actually leave with
By the end of the four hours, you have:
- A live website at your own domain (not a free subdomain)
- A homepage, about page, services page, and contact page
- A working contact form that sends leads to your email
- An understanding of how to go back and change things yourself
That last one matters more than people expect. I have had people email me two weeks after the workshop saying they added a new service page on their own. Or updated their pricing. Or fixed a typo they had been ignoring because they did not know how to log back in.
The site is the deliverable. The confidence to keep improving it is the point.
The next Zero to Live cohort is forming now. See the workshop details and join the waitlist. If you would rather have me build the whole thing for you, my web design services are also an option.
And if you are curious about who I am and why I run this workshop, the about page has the full story.
I am a web designer and consultant based in Newmarket, Ontario. I build custom websites for small businesses across the GTA and run hands-on workshops teaching non-coders how to build their own sites with AI.
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