I’m a skeptic by nature. So when I heard a podcast host build a website live using Claude, my inner Chief Marketer rolled her eyes and thought: cute.
I was wrong.
In the time it used to take me to brief a designer, I went from zero to a live, non-embarrassing website. Here’s the story — and what it actually means for marketers.
The backstory: Years ago I paid a lovely designer in Australia thousands of dollars to build my advisory firm’s site. I wrote every word.
Fast forward to this week. I’d let that site go and was attempting to rebuild on a popular template platform. Disaster.
So I tried something different. I fed Claude my resume, my bio, the nature of my business, and a few focus areas. Two minutes of my time. Two minutes of Claude’s time. Out came a fully-formed, well-written multi-page website — right copy, right structure, right tone.
A few iterations to swap gold for teal, some copy tweaks, Netlify for hosting, and we were live. With a working contact form and everything. No designer. No developer. No weeks.
This is one of a series as I explore the “art of the AI possible” — and what it means for the marketing profession.
What CMOs should actually take away from this
On website strategy:
- Don’t use AI to replace your website wholesale (yet) — but absolutely use it to challenge it. Upload your buyer personas, customer journeys, and current site. Ask Claude what’s missing. You’ll be uncomfortable with how good the answer is.
- Microsites, campaign landing pages, ABM pages? Build them in hours, not weeks. This is table stakes now.
On your creative team:
- Here’s the real shift: your creative people should be spending their time capturing the emotion of your brand — not executing the ho-hum.
- My site has no logo. It’s simple. That’s on me — I didn’t give Claude enough brand direction. The lesson isn’t that AI lacks taste. It’s that brand architecture now matters more than ever, because implementation just got cheap.
- Spend more time defining what makes you distinct. Let AI handle the rest.
The honest fine print: I wouldn’t use Claude to build a mid-market enterprise site from scratch quite yet — backend integrations and complex plugins still need human hands. But for SMBs and growth-stage companies? The calculus has completely changed.
The expensive part used to be building. Now the expensive part is thinking. That’s actually good news for great marketers.
I’ll keep sharing what I’m learning as I go deeper. Would love to know — what AI experiments are you running in your marketing org?
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