Claude Website Migration

Taking Over My Own Website

Web developers can do amazing things with HTML/CSS/JS, but I've been hosting this website with Squarespace for years because Squarespace supports great layout options and I've never had time to learn to do better myself.

That changes this year. AI Agents are sharp enough now to build proper layout and behavior from text instructions. Going forward I'll "ask" for the site that I want and correct the results until it looks good.

Migration with Claude

The first way I tried to migrate was to shoot for the hole-in-one: give Claude Code an empty folder and instuctions like, "Look up my website and make me a local copy with NextJS."

That was too ambitious, Claude tried it but content was missing and the layout was all wrong. Squarespace uses a complex layout scheme so this wasn't very surprising.

The next method worked:

Capture network traffic with Chrome developer tools and browse every page in the site.
Download the network traffic in a HAR file.
Give Claude Code instructions, "Use the HAR file to create a NextJS website ..."
Refine refine refine.

The site in front of you is the result. I even had Claude export the prompt history for the record (not the results, just my instructions). These tools are really good.

Site Copy History

Background Notes on the Workflow

I initialized a git repo as soon as I knew I had something I could work with, and used local commits as checkpoints. If anything went off track, I reset to the last commit.
I created a .env file with AWS access keys when I moved from development to deployment. Claude favors writing bash and python scripts to execute requests outside of editing code, and it will source a .env in its scripts without reading it directly.