AI Builder Series: Your First AI Project Should Be a Website

Meta Description: Starting an AI Builder series. Your first AI project shouldn’t be a chatbot or an agent — it should be rebuilding your website. Here’s why.

Everyone’s first AI project is wrong.

They build a chatbot. Or a “personal assistant.” Or some Rube Goldberg automation that sends a Slack message when their email matches a regex. Cool demo. Zero practical value after the dopamine wears off.

Here’s what your first AI project should actually be: rebuild your website.

Why We’re Starting This Series

This is Part 1 of the AI Builder Series — a set of posts about using AI to build real things that save real time and real money. Not demos. Not proofs of concept. Finished projects that replace something you’re currently paying for or spending time on.

We’re starting with websites because we just did it ourselves. We replaced our Squarespace site with a self-hosted page in under 2 hours using Claude Code. The whole thing — build, deploy, DNS flip — cost $0 and saves us $396/year.

That experience crystallized something we’ve been thinking about: the best way to learn AI isn’t tutorials or courses (and yes, we see the irony — we sell a course). It’s building something you actually need.

The Problem With Most First AI Projects

Most people start learning AI with one of these:

1. “Build a chatbot” — You follow a tutorial, get a bot that answers questions about a PDF, show it to three friends, and never open it again.

2. “Automate my workflow” — You spend 6 hours connecting Zapier to ChatGPT to Google Sheets. It works once. Then an API changes and it breaks. You don’t fix it.

3. “Build an AI agent” — You read about autonomous agents, try to build one, hit the complexity wall at hour 3, and abandon it.

These projects teach you something, but they share a fatal flaw: no one cares about the output. There’s no real-world consequence to finishing or not finishing. No money saved. No time recovered. No visible result you can point to.

Why a Website Is Different

A website rebuild is the perfect first AI project because it checks every box that matters:

1. You Can See and Touch the Result

It’s not an API call returning JSON. It’s not a log file showing “agent completed task.” It’s a website. You can open it in your browser, show it to anyone, put it on your resume. The output is viscerally real.

2. You Already Know What You Want

You don’t need to spec out requirements. You already have a website (or you know what one looks like). The AI can scrape your existing content and use it as a starting point. This eliminates the hardest part of any project — defining what “done” looks like.

3. It Saves Real Money

If you’re paying for Squarespace ($16-33/month), Wix ($17-35/month), or managed WordPress hosting ($25-50/month), replacing that with a free static host saves $200-600/year. That’s not theoretical value. That’s money back in your account.

4. The Risk Is Zero

Your existing site stays live while you build the replacement. If the AI output isn’t good enough, you just don’t deploy it. There’s no production database to corrupt, no customer data to lose, no integration to break.

5. It Teaches the Right Skills

Building a website with AI teaches you:

• Prompt engineering — describing what you want in words
• Iterative refinement — correcting AI output with short follow-ups
• Deployment — getting something from your computer to the internet
• Cost analysis — comparing build-vs-buy decisions

These are the same skills you’ll use for every AI project going forward. But you learn them while producing something useful instead of something disposable.

The Framework: Scrape, Build, Refine, Deploy

Here’s the pattern we used and that we’ll teach throughout this series:

1. Scrape — Point the AI at something that already exists. Don’t describe your brand in words. Let the AI read it directly. This works for websites, documents, competitors, inspiration sites — anything with content.

2. Build — Let the AI generate the first version. Don’t interrupt. Don’t micro-manage. Let it make choices. You’ll be surprised how many of them are good.

3. Refine — Give short, one-sentence corrections. “Change this word.” “Add a section here.” “Link this to that.” Don’t rewrite the prompt. Just nudge.

4. Deploy — Ship it. Free hosting exists everywhere. Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel — all free for static sites. Getting something live is part of the learning.

This framework works because it maps to how AI actually works best: give it a reference, let it generate, then steer. Not the other way around.

What’s Coming in This Series

Over the next few posts, we’ll cover:

• The exact prompt we used — the Anthropic Website Wizard template, our 3-line modification, and the conversational refinements (Part 2)
• Weekend AI build projects — 5 projects beyond websites that follow the same scrape-build-refine-deploy pattern
• The case study — our full Squarespace-to-Cloudflare migration, with real numbers (already published)

Start Here

If you want to try this today, here’s the minimum viable version:

1. Open Claude Code, ChatGPT, or any AI coding tool
2. Say: “Build me a one-page website. Scrape [your-current-url] for the content and style.”
3. Wait 2-3 minutes
4. Open the HTML file in your browser
5. Give 3-5 one-sentence corrections
6. Deploy to a free host

That’s it. You’ll have a new website and your first real AI project in under an hour. No tutorial. No course. No prep work. Just do it.

The best way to learn AI is to use it to build something you actually need. A website is the easiest, lowest-risk, highest-visibility place to start.

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This is Part 1 of the AI Builder Series. Next up: The Prompt That Replaced Our Website — the exact template, modification, and workflow.