I had a WordPress website for my CA practice that looked like it was built in 2014 — because it was. It worked. Clients could find me. But it didn’t reflect what the firm actually does or who I am.

I decided to rebuild it. And I decided to use Claude to do almost all of it.

What I started with

I had a clear sense of brand — black, navy, gold; Playfair Display for headings, DM Sans for body text. I had a positioning statement I liked: AI-powered CA practice focused on international tax for cross-border businesses. I had a phone number and some services I wanted to highlight.

What I didn’t have was HTML, CSS, or time to fiddle with WordPress themes.

The actual workflow

I opened Claude Code — Anthropic’s CLI tool — and described what I wanted. Not just the design, but the purpose. Who the site is for, what it needs to communicate, what action it should drive visitors toward.

Claude wrote the HTML and CSS from scratch. Full custom theme. Navigation, hero section, services grid, footer, mobile responsiveness, WhatsApp float button. It took a few iterations to get the typography and spacing right, but we got there.

The more interesting part was the content. Claude knows how to write in a specific tone if you describe it precisely. I said: knowledgeable, direct, no-fluff, personal. International tax for people who need it done properly. No jargon for jargon’s sake, but don’t dumb it down either.

The blog articles you’re reading on this site — those came out of conversations with Claude where I provided the expertise and direction, and Claude helped shape it into something readable.

What worked well

Speed, primarily. The site went from concept to live in a few days of work that I fit around client commitments. I didn’t need to brief a designer, wait for mockups, brief a developer, wait for builds, go through revision cycles. I had direct control over every element at every step.

The code quality was also genuinely good. Clean, semantic HTML. CSS variables for the design system. Responsive without hacks. This is my site and I can read and edit every line of it.

What required judgment

AI doesn’t know your business. It knows language and structure and code patterns. The actual positioning — what to emphasise, what to leave out, which services to lead with, what the WhatsApp CTA should say — that came from me.

I’ve seen people use AI to build sites that say nothing. Generic consulting copy, stock photo energy, no differentiation. That’s not the tool’s failure. That’s the operator not knowing what they want to say.

If you know what your business actually is, AI can help you say it at speed. If you don’t know yet, no amount of AI will fix that.

Where it goes next

I treat the website as a working document now, not a fixed asset. I update content when I have something useful to say. I add blog posts on topics that come up repeatedly with clients. I tweak the SEO when I notice gaps.

That’s genuinely different from how most professional services firms treat their websites — as something expensive that gets rebuilt every five years.

The AI-built, human-directed website is a better model. I expect most professionals will figure this out over the next few years.