How to Build a Website with AI

This is the intro to my 10-part course on making a custom website using AI.

Who is this guide for?

If you're opinionated about how your site should look, and want something beyond the design AI will give you - this is for you.

The value of presenting ourselves and our work, on our own terms - has never been higher. Creating your own space to engage with people is a fantastic way to stand out and engage people in what matters to you.

This is a guide for those who:

• want to create their own space online, whether a portfolio, blog etc.
• have at least edited a couple lines of HTML.
• want to understand Agentic AI as part of the creative process
• don't want to depend on closed, proprietary services (e.g. design generators, AI website builders)

With that said, this course takes you through all the steps without handwriting any code - so beginners are welcome. Just know that understanding what the tech is used for will help you build what you want - so don't skip too much.

My promise to you

Communicating the why behind each step as non-technically as possible - that's my promise to you. I am very mindful about what I choose to include in this course.

To help you stay on track, each unit:

• starts with clear objectives
• comes with a checklist
• is concise, because the goal is to keep you going
• contains reflection questions, to maximize your learning

I want to keep your momentum high, so this is a very streamlined course.

The contents of this course were not AI-generated - this is just me writing down my process and structuring it in a way that you can learn from.

So why did you write this? Can’t I just ask AI how to make a website?

I wrote this guide because friends asked me to. I don’t have any special credentials, in fact - I’m more of an artist and designer. And so are my friends. I was sharing the process of making my latest portfolio website on Instagram, and kept getting asked: how do you do it?

If all you want is a quick website, you should probably ask AI straight away. I actually think this course is not about web design.

Since Agentic coding (more on that in the next unit) became a thing - it's become much easier to collaborate with an AI. 50% of this course is about that.

Yes, the outcome is oriented towards crafting a great website. But more than that: we’re actually learning how to direct and guide the AI’s efforts.

We're going through the creative process, and helping AI understand our intentions.

Do I need a paid AI subscription?

The creative process in this guide inherently reduces the amount of AI use. So - hopefully, you can make a lot of progress without hitting usage limits too fast.

And if you do, just be patient. (Or switch tool / log on with another account ;) )

Unknown unknowns: taking this course beyond web design

This short clip from The Boondocks will make the following paragraphs easier to grasp.

Basically I want you to become an expert at discovering your unknown unknowns.

If there's a topic you've never heard of, how do you even become aware of your knowledge gap? You wouldn't even know that you need to look for it. That's an unknown unknown. Things that we don't know that we don't know.

But it's very valuable to learn discovering your unknown unknowns. Let's take CSS as an example.

Looking at a website, we:

• see that it has a design, right?
• we can assume that there's something controlling the design.
• we don't know what that is - but now it's a known unknown

Describe to the AI what you're looking for - and ask for the proper terminology. You would learn that CSS exists, by simply assuming that something must be controlling the design. And then you can continue building your understanding from there.

If you focus on the why of what we’re doing in this course - you’ll have plenty of general takeaways for using AI.