About a year ago, I deleted my personal blog as I was so busy building sites for other people that I never got around to updating my own site. But I’ve rebuilt it anew in the last couple of weeks just so that I’d have somewhere to document what I’m now finally doing for myself. The re-creation of elizabethjamieson.com is my first project.
I’m a good software engineer – but I’d never call myself a designer. The biggest effort for me when building a WordPress site was always the design. So I used Claude to design the one you’re looking at right now.
I gave Claude some guidance. For example, I didn’t want huge hero images – rather I wanted large scripted text in the hero. When your blog does not have natural images because for example, it is not a recipe site nor a photography site, obligatory hero images become a right PITA to have to find or create. So I wanted to avoid them altogether.
I further specified to Claude that the design had to be typographic in nature.
It was produced as a set of HTML mockups. The design was one I would never have come up with by myself. Next, I worked with Novamira Pro to instruct Claude Code to build the site one page at a time.
Every page is made with WordPress and Bricks Builder, and every word, image and link on it sits in an Advanced Custom Fields field, so nothing on the screen is typed into the layout.
I am aware there are some whopping problems with the design – but I didn’t want to spend any more time fixing than I have already. I prefer to see where the problems occurred and try to workflow/code my way around them so they don’t impact me next time.
What I’m saying is that this, “build a working, easy to update, functional, useful WordPress site in Claude and Bricks Builder” malarkey is going to be a very iterative process.
But, on the positive side, right now I can get a site designed and implemented in a few days when before it would have taken me a month or even two.
The mega menu self-generates as well (hallelujah) as I taught Claude how I like to build them. It runs off the ACF data and changes automatically when I add a post or an instance of a custom post type. No menu editing whatsoever is ever required. I like that.