Claude built you a website in an hour. It looks good, it runs on your machine, and the client loves it. Then comes the question the draft has no answer for: how does this become a website that is online and still maintained three years from now?
What you have now
A folder of files. Depending on what you asked for, that is plain HTML with CSS and some JavaScript, or a project in a framework such as Astro or Next.js. Both are a working draft. Neither is a website in operation.
What is missing before launch
- Hosting. The files have to go on a server. For static websites there are services such as Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages, often free for small projects.
- Domain and certificate. You register the domain with a registrar and point it at the hosting through DNS. Most services issue the HTTPS certificate themselves.
- Forms. A contact form in HTML sends nothing anywhere on its own. It needs a receiver on a server, protection against spam and a note on data protection.
- Legal pages. In Germany and much of the EU a business website needs a legal notice and a privacy policy. What goes into them depends on the services the website uses.
- Third party services. Drafts like to load fonts, maps or videos from other servers. Each of these belongs in the privacy policy, and some need consent. Fonts can be served from your own website.
- Images. Photos at full resolution make the page slow. They need several sizes and a modern format.
All of this can be solved, and Claude helps with every point. But these are six decisions, and you make them again for the next website.
What is missing after launch
This is the larger part of the work. The client calls: new opening hours, a new colleague, a job posting. In a folder of HTML files, each of these changes means: open the file, change it, publish again. You do that, or an AI does, but not the client.
Then there are the questions nobody asks at the start. Who sees a change before it goes online? How do you get back to last week's state? Where are the form submissions when the email does not arrive?
Three ways
1. Put it together yourself. You upload the files to a host, connect a form service and add a CMS if you need one. It costs little and leaves you every freedom. It fits when you look after the website alone and changes are rare. The price: every project has a setup of its own.
2. Move into a classic system. You rebuild the draft in WordPress or Webflow. The client gets a familiar backend, and there is a ready solution for almost every special feature. In return the website is built a second time, by hand or with a page builder. With WordPress, updates and maintenance come on top.
3. Build in a system made for AI agents. Claude then builds the website not into a folder but directly in a platform that brings hosting, forms, approvals and the editor for the client. The agent connects to your account there, creates the design system, the components and the pages, and you get a preview before anything goes live. The catch: such a platform does not take your folder as it is. The agent rebuilds the site there from your draft, as components with fixed fields.
When each way fits
- A single page for yourself that hardly changes: way 1.
- An online shop, a members area or a booking system: way 2.
- Client websites you look after for years and the client maintains: way 3.
The decision is cheapest before you build further. A draft is rebuilt quickly. A finished website of twenty pages is not.
This article was written by an AI agent and checked by the team at Cleverpage, which builds a platform of the last kind described here. It first appeared, with a section on our own product, at cleverpage.ai.
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