How I Built My Author Website 

I’m going to put it out there straight away: I can’t take all the credit for my author website. 

A fairly significant amount of the technical work was done with the help of Claude Fable 5. 

That was never the original plan. I knew I would need an author website eventually, and I had already spent a good amount of time trying to put something together using WordPress, much like I had with this blog. 

The problem was that it just wasn’t coming together in the way I wanted. 

It was basic. It was functional. Technically, it was a website. 

But it wasn’t particularly attractive, and I was severely limited by the customisation available through the WordPress Personal plan. I could picture the sort of website I wanted in my head, but I couldn’t work out how to turn that picture into something real. 

I simply didn’t like what I had created. 

Then, almost entirely by accident, I discovered another way of doing it. 

An Accidental Change of Direction 

I’ve used ChatGPT since December 2022 for all sorts of different tasks, although I’d never been completely impressed by its ability to help with some of the more technical things I was trying to do. 

I was aware that other AI models existed, but I hadn’t paid them much attention until I started hearing more about Claude and, in particular, its ability to write code. 

I found the wider discussion around the technology fascinating and, honestly, slightly worrying at times. AI is a controversial subject, and I’ve written about my broader thoughts on it before. I completely understand why some people won’t be comfortable with its involvement in creative projects. 

For me, though, I was interested in whether it could help me achieve something I didn’t currently have the skills or resources to build on my own. 

At the time, I was still trying to use AI to customise my WordPress author site, without much success. So, after deciding to give Claude a try, I asked it to suggest some ways I could create a good author website. 

For whatever reason, I forgot to mention that I was using WordPress. 

Instead of recommending themes, plugins and page layouts, it suggested building the entire website from scratch using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. 

Funnily enough, when I first started thinking about a career in IT, I originally wanted to become a full-stack web developer. I even spent a short amount of time learning HTML before eventually moving in a different direction. 

Mostly for the fun of it, I asked Claude to generate an example website. 

And it did. 

I was blown away. 

Don’t get me wrong, the first version was incredibly simple. It looked nothing like the website I had pictured in my head, and I certainly wouldn’t have published it. 

But that wasn’t really the point. 

The fact that I could describe a website and receive a collection of actual HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that I could open in a browser genuinely blew my mind. I immediately saw it as an opportunity to try something completely new. 

Claude didn’t know what my website should look like. It didn’t understand the atmosphere of my novel, what information mattered to me or what I wanted visitors to feel when they arrived. 

Those decisions still needed to come from me. 

What it gave me was a way to turn those ideas into something real. 

Working Out What My Author Website Needed

Once I began to understand what was possible, my mind exploded with ideas. 

Before I let Claude run away and build whatever it thought an author website should look like, I took a step back and thought properly about what I actually needed the site to achieve. 

To begin with, I already knew I had plans for more than one novel. I have an entire saga’s worth of ideas, so the website needed to be flexible enough to grow alongside it. 

It couldn’t simply be a single page promoting one book. It needed to become the home of the wider series. 

An author page was another obvious requirement. After all, what is the point of having an author website if I’m not going to write a little bit about myself? 

I wanted the website to be visually engaging and fit the atmosphere of the novel, but it also needed to be clear and easy to navigate. There is no point in creating something beautiful if nobody can work out where anything is. 

I also wanted to offer a sample of the novel to encourage people to subscribe for updates. That meant I would need some sort of mailing-list form embedded into the website, along with somewhere to store downloadable EPUB and PDF copies of the opening chapters. 

Beyond the book itself, I wanted the site to contain information about the world. 

As the setting developed, I could gradually add spoiler-free information about its locations, history and characters. That meant the website would eventually need dedicated lore pages, even if some of them were only placeholders to begin with. 

There was another important requirement too. 

I’m tight. 

If there was a way to build and host the whole thing for free, or at least as close to free as possible, that was exactly what I intended to do. 

Researching Other Author Websites 

I knew what I wanted the site to contain, but I had absolutely no idea how to design it. 

I’ve never been a web designer, and having a vague image in my head wasn’t enough. I needed to understand what other authors were doing, what readers expected to find and what generally made a website pleasant to use. 

I spent a good chunk of time researching other author websites. Reddit was a particularly useful source of information, both for finding examples and reading discussions about what worked and what didn’t. 

That research helped confirm some of the features I already had in mind, but it also introduced things I hadn’t properly considered. 

The biggest was mobile design. 

It sounds obvious now, but I had initially been picturing the website entirely as something people would view on a computer. In reality, plenty of visitors would probably arrive using a phone. 

More often than not, perhaps. 

The website therefore needed to be responsive, automatically adjusting its layout, text and images to fit different screen sizes. It couldn’t simply look good on my monitor and collapse into complete nonsense the moment somebody opened it on a phone. 

Once I had a clearer idea of my requirements, I gathered together the concept artwork and other materials I had created over the previous few months and gave them to Claude. 

From there, we started putting together a proper design brief. 

Choosing the Infrastructure 

There were three main services I needed to find. 

First, I needed somewhere to host the static website. Second, I needed a mailing-list service that could be embedded into it. Finally, I needed a way for early readers to submit feedback and register their interest in becoming ARC readers later. 

After doing some research, I settled on Cloudflare Pages for hosting. 

It allowed me to host a static website for free, while also providing basic analytics so I could see how much traffic the site was receiving. It gave me more than enough to get everything online without immediately committing to another monthly subscription. 

For the mailing list, I chose MailerLite. 

Again, there was a free tier that gave me plenty of room to get started. More importantly, it allowed me to embed a customised subscription form directly into the website and create newsletters for future updates. 

Finally, I created a basic Google Form for readers to submit feedback on the sample chapters and express an interest in becoming an ARC reader. 

It isn’t quite as elegant as I would eventually like it to be, but it is free, easy to manage and does the job for now. 

At this point, getting everything working mattered more than creating the perfect feedback system. 

Oh, and I needed a domain. 

Luckily, I already had a name for the wider saga. Even more luckily, the matching domain was available. 

That part could have gone very differently. 

Building the First Proper Version 

Once those decisions had been made, I gave all of that information back to Claude. 

There was quite a bit of back and forth around the visual style. One of the things that impressed me most was its ability to analyse the concept cover art and build a colour palette around it. 

That immediately made the website feel connected to the book. 

It wasn’t just a generic fantasy template with my name pasted across the top. The colours, lighting and imagery felt as though they belonged to the same world as the novel. 

Eventually, Claude produced the first complete concept for the website. 

I was utterly blown away. 

It was far better than anything I could have hoped to produce on my own, and I was honestly shaking with excitement when I first opened it. 

Over the following week, I spent hours going back and forth, making changes and gradually refining the design. 

Some changes were practical. Others were simply things I thought would look cool. 

I added animated embers drifting across the main hero image. Images expanded slightly and developed a glow when somebody hovered over them. Sections faded into view as the visitor moved down the page. 

Were all of those things strictly necessary? 

Probably not. 

Did I enjoy adding them anyway? 

Absolutely. 

That was one of the most enjoyable parts of the entire process. Each time I thought of something new, I could ask whether it was possible, test the result and then decide whether it genuinely improved the website or simply made it more distracting. 

Claude generated much of the code, but I was still making the decisions. I chose the layout, provided the artwork, wrote the text and decided what stayed or disappeared. 

It became a genuinely collaborative process. 

Adding the Subscriber Experience 

Once the main website was ready, I moved on to the custom subscriber form that would be used to distribute the opening three chapters. 

This part was relatively straightforward because the visual style had already been established. I could ask Claude to create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript required to make the form match the rest of the website. 

All of the actual written content still came from me. 

That was important. I was happy for AI to help build the structure around my work, but I wanted the words on the website to sound like me. The author biography, descriptions of the story and information about the world all needed to remain personal. 

Once somebody subscribed, they would receive access to downloadable EPUB and PDF versions of the sample. That gave readers the choice of loading it onto an e-reader or simply opening it on whatever device they already had. 

I then built the Google feedback form. 

Because there was very little customisation involved, it didn’t take particularly long. I already knew the sorts of questions I wanted to ask: what readers enjoyed, what confused them, whether anything felt slow and whether they would be interested in reading more. 

It wasn’t fancy, but it worked. 

Putting the Website Online 

The final major step was getting everything onto Cloudflare. 

Honestly, this part was much easier than I expected. 

I created the Cloudflare Pages project, uploaded the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and image files, and let Cloudflare build the live version of the site. 

I then needed to connect the custom domain. 

The domain had originally been registered through GoDaddy, so I moved its management across to Cloudflare and connected it to the Pages project. That involved updating the domain settings, making sure the correct records were in place and waiting for everything to work its way across the internet. 

There were a few moments when I was convinced I had broken something. 

Because of course there were. 

Eventually, though, the domain started pointing towards the correct place, the security certificate activated and the website appeared online. 

Not just as a file on my computer. 

Not just as a test page that only I could see. 

It was an actual website, published across the World Wide Web and available for anyone to visit. 

Asking Reddit to Tear It Apart 

I thought the finished website looked great. 

But let’s be honest: I was hardly an unbiased reviewer. 

I had spent hours staring at it, I was emotionally invested in it and I knew very little about professional web design. I needed feedback from people who understood it better than I did. 

So, I shared the website with the community over at r/webdesign and asked for their thoughts. 

I received some genuinely useful feedback. 

Some suggestions focused on the interface and visual design, while others were more concerned with whether the website was actually achieving its purpose. 

That was an important distinction. 

It wasn’t enough for the website to look impressive. Its job was to make people interested in the book, encourage them to read the sample and give them a clear reason to subscribe for future updates. 

Ultimately, I wanted the website to help build an audience before the book was released, rather than sitting online as little more than a particularly elaborate digital business card. 

Based on the feedback, I made a number of changes to the design and navigation. I adjusted certain elements that were distracting, clarified parts of the page and improved the route visitors would take towards downloading the sample or joining the mailing list. 

By the time I had finished implementing everything, I was on version 33 of the website. 

Looking back through the earlier versions was incredibly satisfying. The original concept contained the basic idea, but the final version was clearer, more polished and much more focused. 

It had evolved from an interesting experiment into something I was genuinely proud to share. 

What the Project Taught Me 

The biggest thing I took away from the project wasn’t simply that AI could write HTML. 

It was that tools like this can make certain projects feel accessible to people who would previously have dismissed them as being beyond their abilities. 

Without Claude, I could probably have built some form of author website. It would have taken considerably longer, required much more learning and almost certainly looked very different. 

Realistically, I probably would have settled for the WordPress version. 

AI didn’t remove all of the work. I still had to decide what the website needed, research good design, choose the services, provide the assets, write the content, test everything and work through the feedback. 

It also didn’t make every decision correctly. There were plenty of suggestions that didn’t work, features that looked better in theory and moments where fixing one thing managed to break something completely unrelated. 

But it helped close the gap between what I could imagine and what I could actually create. 

For me, that is where tools like this become genuinely exciting. 

They don’t have to replace the person making something. They can simply give that person a new way to make it. 

More than anything, the project gave me the chance to create a proper home for the story I’ve been working on. 

Writing a novel can be a very slow process. For long stretches of time, most of the progress exists inside a document that nobody else can see. Building the website made the wider project feel more tangible. 

It gave the saga a name, a visual identity and its own little corner of the internet. 

The website has now been live for over a month, and I’m already working on a fairly considerable package of upgrades and improvements. 

Assuming it all goes well and I don’t completely break the site, I’ll write another post about that process too. 

You can see the finished project here. 

Have you ever used a new tool or piece of technology to create something you previously thought was beyond your abilities?