How I built a client website with Claude Code, start to handover

Last month a hiking-tour company asked us for a new website: home, tours, guides, gear blog, contact. Old quote for this kind of job: three weeks and a WordPress build I’d resent. This time the build took two days, and the handover took ten minutes. Here’s the honest play-by-play.

Day one, morning: scaffold and schema

One command gives you a running frontend, the studio and a SQLite database in one repo. Then I opened Claude Code and described the site in about four sentences — who the client is, what pages exist, what a “tour” contains (dates, difficulty, price, route notes). The agent wrote the schema file and created the content types through the API. I reviewed a 40-line diff instead of clicking through an admin panel.

Day one, afternoon: the agent builds

The prompt that did most of the work: “Build all pages with real copy in the client’s voice — plain, outdoorsy, no marketing filler. Seed 4 tours and 3 blog posts from the notes in brief.md.” Because agents write through the content API, everything landed as structured, editable content — not hardcoded JSX I’d have to un-bake later. That’s the difference between this and a one-shot AI site builder.

Day two: review and fixes

I sent the client a preview link. Feedback came back pinned to the actual pages (“swap this photo”, “difficulty should say moderate, not medium”). The agent fixed the copy notes; I fixed the layout ones. Total revision time: under two hours.

Handover day

I invited maria@ as admin, scoped my agent’s key down to author, and sent one email: “Here’s your login, it works like WordPress.” No Loom, no training call. She published a post that evening without asking anything.

Three weeks later the audit log shows 11 publishes, one new team member, zero messages to me. The full workflow is documented on the how it works page; the prompts are in the starter pack.