Build Your First Website
From nothing on your laptop to a live link you can send anyone — every step, and every single thing that goes wrong along the way.
The first time I walked a complete beginner through this — someone who'd never properly used a Mac — it took an afternoon, and the snags below are exactly the ones that tripped them up. Most tutorials hide the bit where the terminal throws an error and you panic. This one keeps them in, because the snags are where everyone gets stuck.
You need three things: a computer, a Claude Pro subscription (£17/month), and about an hour. You will not write a single line of code. Click through the steps below.
Step 1 · Your turn
Install VS Code
First, the place you'll work. VS Code is a free code editor — think of it as the workshop where everything happens.
Visual Studio Code
Free. Drag it into Applications, open it.
- Go to code.visualstudio.com, click the big Download for Mac button, open the download and drag it into Applications.
- Open Visual Studio Code.
What goes wrong
You make Visual Studio Code full-screen and instantly get lost — windows vanish, you can't find anything.
The fix
Don't run it full-screen. It genuinely makes things more confusing. If you're stuck in it, three-finger swipe (or hit the green button) back to a normal window.
→ VS Code is open on your machine. This is the workshop — everything else happens inside it.
Want Claude to walk you through it live?
Don't want to read — want a hand? Paste this into Claude and it becomes your patient teacher: one step at a time, plain English, waiting for you at every stage, all the way to a live URL.
Want a hand getting set up?
I run one-to-one AI coaching — we get you from nothing to live, at your pace, and sort the snags in real time. Brand new or already experimenting, we work out where AI actually helps you and build it together.
Book one-to-one coaching →