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I Built This Site in a Weekend With Claude

From a Squarespace subscription to a hand-built site with five pixel coworkers, in about 24 hours.

The heyryker.com landing page: the big HEY [I’M] RYKER headline with five small pixel meeples wandering over it, pixel flowers and grass planted around them, and the [I’M] tinted yellow where the yellow meeple is standing on it.

For a few years, my portfolio lived on Squarespace. It did its job. It also looked a lot like every other portfolio on Squarespace, and it cost me $270 a year plus tax for the privilege.

Then someone told me I should be using AI to be more creative. I knew they had a point. My site needed an update, and I’d known it for a while. But every time I thought about rebuilding it, I pictured a heavy lift, the kind of project that eats every free evening for a month, so I kept putting it off. The ideas were never the hard part. It was everything between the idea and a working website.

So on a Saturday morning, I tried it.

The setup

The whole stack is three tools:

  • Claude wrote the code. I described what I wanted, looked at what came back and said what to change.
  • GitHub holds the code. Every change lands as a pull request I can review before it goes anywhere.
  • Vercel builds and hosts the site. Every pull request gets its own preview link, so I could click around the real thing on my laptop and my phone before saying yes.

That loop is the part that surprised me. It didn’t feel like prompting a chatbot. It felt like art directing a very fast developer who never got tired of “move it one grid cell to the left.”

Saturday to Sunday

An early version of the landing page on Saturday: the HEY [I’M] RYKER headline on a visible gray grid, five meeples wandering around it, two pixel flowers already planted, and the case study links in gray brackets along the bottom.
Saturday. The grid lines were still visible, and the meeples had already started gardening.

I started with a brief: who the site is for, the colors, the type, a mockup of the landing page and a long description of five tiny pixel characters I wanted living on it. Then we went down the list.

By Saturday afternoon there was a landing page with a headline locked to a grid and five meeples you could drag, throw and explode. By Saturday night they had personalities, and some of them had opinions about the headline. Sunday was case studies, a blog, an About page, a menu, search and share basics, analytics and moving my domain over.

About 24 hours after I started, I had a mostly complete site and 28 merged pull requests. I’m still tweaking things, but that’s the fun part.

The cost

Here’s the math that made me laugh:

  • Squarespace: $270 a year, billed annually, plus tax.
  • This site: a $20 a month Claude subscription. GitHub and Vercel are both on their free plans.

And I didn’t trade a template for a template. I got a site that does exactly what I want, down to the pixel, with nothing I didn’t ask for.

Making it fun (and a little random)

A portfolio is supposed to be professional, and the case studies are. But I wanted the rest of the site to feel like somewhere you’d poke around for a minute longer than you meant to.

That’s the meeples’ job. Each one has a personality. The yellow one is curious and follows your cursor. The green one is shy and runs away. The purple one watches. The red one is chaos. The blue one is mostly asleep, in a nightcap, and occasionally sleepwalks somewhere new. If one walks over the blue parts of my name, they take on its color. Click one and it explodes into pixels, then slowly puts itself back together.

None of that was in a plan. A lot of it came from me saying “what if they did this” halfway through something else. Having the code be fast and cheap to change meant I could say yes to the random ideas instead of saving them for a someday that never comes.

Why the meeples garden

The meeple village: five small houses in each meeple’s color, a town hall with a blue roof, a fenced garden in the middle full of flowers and carrots, a justice building at the bottom, and cows, sheep and bunnies in the grass.
The village. Yes, there’s a courthouse.

Outside of design, I love gardening and landscaping. There’s something about planning a space, putting things in the ground and watching it fill in over time that scratches the same itch as building a brand.

So the meeples garden too. Leave the landing page open and they’ll plant flowers, grass and carrots around the headline. The red one tramples them, because of course it does. Click the period after my name and a gold flower pops up, and all five of them gather round to cheer.

They even have a village now, with houses, a big shared garden in the middle and a few cows, sheep and bunnies. It has absolutely nothing to do with my resume, and it might be my favorite page on the site.

The takeaway

The advice was right, just not how I expected. AI didn’t give me ideas. It took away the cost of trying them. When a weird idea takes minutes to see instead of a weekend, you try a lot more weird ideas, and some of them turn into tiny pixel people with a vegetable garden.

If you’ve been sitting on a site you’re not excited about, this is your sign. Your move.