How I built this website for free, in five steps

This site did not happen in a weekend. I started it in May 2024 as a very plain Angular page, left it alone for a long time, and rebuilt it in bursts after that. Everything below costs nothing, except my Claude subscription. You could swap that for another AI coding tool; what matters is the approach, not the brand.

Step 1: Get a free domain

In Nepal you can register a .com.np domain at register.com.np. You submit an application with a photo of an identity document, and there is a tutorial on YouTube that walks through the form. Once it is approved, you only get to set nameservers there, so DNS is handled by whoever hosts the site. That comes in step 3.

Step 2: Build the basic site

I used Angular, and the current site runs on Angular 22. A first build is just a few pages and a way to produce static files. My very first version, from 2024, was a single About Me block and a plain menu. It worked, and it looked like what it was.

Before Claude, 2024: a plain Angular page with an About Me block.

Step 3: Host it on Netlify

A static site is free there, and Netlify gives you nameservers you can paste into register.com.np. Point the domain at them, then wait for DNS to settle. That can take up to a day, so do not panic if the site does not show up straight away. After that, the site is on your own address with HTTPS.

Step 4: Improve it with Claude Code and skills

Once the hosting works, the interesting part starts. A skill is a set of written instructions the AI follows for a type of job, and the right ones change the result a lot. For design, I used frontend-design, then Leonxlnx's taste-skill (including its soft-skill and redesign-skill), and I borrowed ideas from the Apple, Linear and Spotify write-ups in VoltAgent's awesome-design-md. For search, I ran claude-seo as an audit checklist. To keep the AI from over-building, I used ponytail, which pushes for the smallest change that works. All of them are linked below.

My first pass with Claude was fast, and it showed: a purple header, a coral button, cards in a grid. It was tidy and completely generic. The second pass, using the skills above and a lot of me saying 'not that', is the site you see now. The screenshots show the three stages.

First Claude pass: clean, purple and coral, and very generic.

Now: after skills, redesign and SEO polish.

Step 5: Deploy when you are happy with it

I do this by hand: a build, then a deploy to Netlify. No automatic pipeline, because for a personal site I would rather decide when it goes live.

What I left out on purpose

There is more behind the scenes that I am not going to walk through here: a small Netlify function, a Telegram bot that tells me when someone fills in the contact form, and the content set-up for posts like this one. None of it is a secret, and one good afternoon of research would get you there.

But if you want something like this and would rather not spend that afternoon, or you would like me to look at a site you already have, get in touch. I am happy to help.