Many years ago, I used to build websites for a living.
Back then, every update was a project. Someone would ask for a color change or a new link and I'd block out time, dig through code, test it, hope nothing broke somewhere else. Simple requests turned into hours. It was tedious in a way that's hard to explain unless you've lived it.
That process doesn't exist for me anymore.
The Update Is Just a Conversation
Now an update looks like this: "Can you change this link to..." or "let's update the accent color." I say it to Claude like I'm talking to a person, and it's done. No blocking out an afternoon. No digging through code. Just a conversation that turns into a live change.
Conversation to deployment. Instant. I love this part more than almost anything else about how I work now.
The Exact Process
Idea first. Then a conversation with Claude to design and code it. From there, two paths to get it live:
- Download the files and drop them into Hostinger, or
- Files go through GitHub first, then connect to Hostinger for deployment
Quick breakdown if those are new to you:
- GitHub is where the code lives. It tracks every version and every change, so nothing gets lost and nothing gets overwritten by accident.
- Hostinger is the host, the place where the site becomes a real, live web address people can visit. (Save 20% by using my referral link.)
Going GitHub to Hostinger makes deployment fast. Push an update, and it's live in minutes. This is the exact process I use for my own site and every client site, app, lead magnet, and landing page I build.
What This Unlocked
Because it's this fast, my capacity changed too. I can take on more clients who need to know what to build, because building it isn't the bottleneck anymore. It used to eat my time. Now it barely touches it.
The Pendulum Swung Back
For the average small business owner, the website world has gone in a full circle. Years ago it was custom builds, thousands of dollars, months of back and forth with a developer. Then it swung to the $39 a month template site. Plug in your info, pick a theme, done. Now it's swinging back to custom builds again, this time built with AI.
Here's the catch nobody's warning people about. These builds are being done by people with no background in how a website actually works. It looks shiny. But it's missing the things that actually matter. Data tracking. Privacy policy and terms of service. Sitemaps. Real SEO and AEO optimization, not just the appearance of it.
You can prompt Claude to "make my website optimized" and it'll do something. But without knowing what optimization actually requires, that prompt can leave real gaps, or even work against the site's own performance. A custom AI build isn't automatically a good build. It's only as good as the knowledge behind the prompts.
The Problem Nobody's Talking About
Zoom out and there's a bigger version of this same issue. Everyone having access to these tools has created a flood of things people build that don't serve their business. Landing pages, apps, tools, side projects, all built in an afternoon because it's possible now. It's shiny object syndrome on steroids. It used to be that you got distracted by what other people built. Now you get distracted by what you yourself can build, and that's a much harder pull to resist.
Your own build can derail you. I've watched it happen. Something gets built because it was fast and fun to build, not because the business needed it.
The Real Gap
This is the actual gap right now. Not access to the tools, everyone has that. The gap is having a growth plan, and the knowledge to know what a website actually needs, then building it with the help of AI so what you create actually moves the business forward instead of just existing because you could make it.
This is what I help coaches and consultants do: build a growth plan, then build the assets with AI the right way, so that growth becomes inevitable instead of accidental.