Build a Website with AI in 30 Minutes (Claude + Hugo Tutorial)

Hey everybody, this is Brent Dunn from Market Unlock, and in today's video we are going to be using Claude from Anthropic to both set up an environment on our computers that allows us to use AI to very quickly both research which niche we should use or what we should get into, finding us a domain, and building the website. And we should be able to do all this in roughly 30 minutes. So Just real quick, what you will actually need for this is at minimum a Pro subscription to Claude. I am not an affiliate. I don't get any money by you signing up to this. I just use Claude every single day. I personally have the $200 a month Max plan, but the only difference between that and the Pro plan is how much usage you can get out of it. Now, the reason why you need the Pro plan is for what we're doing is you want to be able to access Claude code from the terminal. And what this allows us to do is it allows us to give Claude access within the terminal on your computer, which we will go through. It's not that scary. It allows it to create files, read files, and edit files. You could get away with using the free plan and sitting there and copying and pasting and stuff, but the speed at which we can create stuff is quite amazing. So I would suggest starting with the pro plan. As you get more familiar with the AI and you start to use it more, then you can start finding whatever plan fits your usage as much as possible. So once you get the Pro plan, you next will want to go to the Claude Code docs. And the reason for this is you will actually need to install Claude Code on your computer, and this will depend on the operating system. So Claude Code works on both macOS, works on Windows in PowerShell. And Linux. I personally am using Linux. And the next tool that we'll need is Hugo. So Hugo is a CMS. The best way to think about it is it's similar to WordPress in the sense that it's a CMS. The difference is, is it allows you to build an entire website without the use of a database. And so what this allows us to do is Hugo allows us to actually create our entire site and be able to modify and everything on our own computer. And then we actually can use Hugo to actually build the site, which turns the entire site into a bunch of HTML files. So all the rendering and actual processing happens on your computer once, and then that allows you to actually upload the static files to first to something like Cloudflare, and we can actually host it for free up to a certain point. So this is a great tool because. It also uses Markdown under the hood to actually write the different content, and AI understands Markdown extremely well. So this— I have found that this is one of the best ways to build websites with the use of AI. So once you have installed Hugo on your computer, it's in the docs, I believe it is, somewhere. Maybe it's on the GitHub. Yeah, so on the actual GitHub, it shows you how to actually install it. Your computer. So we'll go ahead and hop into Terminal here. Now real quick, the only thing you're really going to need to know is if you are on Windows, you want to open up PowerShell. If you are on Mac or Linux, you open up Terminal. And what you want to do is create a folder on your computer that you will be working in. And what you can do— I'll make this a bit bigger here. A lot bigger, is you'll type in cd, which means change directory. And once you have a folder on your computer, you can literally just drag and drop it into Terminal, or again PowerShell. I'm just going to keep saying Terminal going forward. And once you do, it'll look something like this. You just click Enter and you actually switch directories. So once you are in whatever folder that you will want to be working in I usually don't have my text this large— is what we'll want to do— actually, I'm going to open this back up so you guys can see it— is we're going to type hugo new site. So that is the command for Hugo to create a new site, and then you'll want to name whatever the site is. So in this case, I'll use tutorial, and we'll see on the left side That in our Claude workspace, which is the folder I'm working in, it created tutorial. And inside tutorial is a created Hugo site, just a base site. So what I do is I'll cd into the folder that Hugo just made on a new tab. So you can just create new. Again, I'm cd'ing into this and now I'll do hugo server. And it just started running a local version of the site on my computer. Now it's going to say page not found. That's completely okay because we are going to have the AI actually build the site. So what we'll do is we'll clear this and going back to our original terminal window, make sure that this terminal is also inside of the inside of the Hugo folder. So in this case, it's tutorial for me. I'm going to type in Claude, and this will open up Claude Code, which is the AI, and you can type to it just like anything else, and it will start to actually do things. So now I'm going to teach you how to use skills. So these are a few skills that I have created and use internally. If you want access to these skills, there is a link in the description down below, and I will have a whole package of these skills so you can use them as well. Now, some of these things you can just skip, but for example, if you don't even know which niche you want to build a site for or get into, I actually have a skill set up to do just that. So to use a skill, I type /find niche, and it's going to actually run a prompt in the background And the AI will start to ask me different questions. And so to answer these questions, I can use the arrow keys on my keyboard to move around, and I click spacebar to actually select which one I want. So it's saying, what skills, industries, or topics do I have experience with? I'll say tech and software, finance and business, and I'll go ahead and click next. And now it's asking what primary monetization goal do I have for this niche? We'll go ahead and just say affiliate content revenue. Press enter. Are there any niches you're already considering? Let's just go ahead and say no, start fresh. And how much articles can I write a week? I'll go ahead and say high because I'm going to be using AI to help with most of this content. And I will submit my answers. So now what will happen is the AI is now taking the prompt that is behind the scenes with find niche. Oh, it's asking me some more. I want to avoid— yeah, I want to avoid crypto. I want to avoid gambling. Let's go ahead and avoid health supplements as well. Do you have an existing asset to leverage? I will say starting from zero and submit my answers. So What is great about this is it's a completely interactive system by actually giving the AI information about what you're looking for. So now when you see this, it says tool use. What it's asking for is permissions to be able to do a web search for, in this case, B2B SaaS software. I'm just going to go ahead and allow it to do everything in the tutorial workspace folder. Now When you're first starting out, I would suggest that you actually go through and make sure that it's not trying to do something funky because this thing is able to do anything a human can do pretty much. So it can go surf the web and do all sorts of stuff to get information. So I'm going to go ahead and speed up the video because what's going to happen is this thing will just continuously research. It probably will take anywhere between a few minutes to 5 minutes, basically. And it will come back with a few solutions or a few niche ideas that we can move forward with. Okay, so it came back with some recommendations and it is saying construction estimating software is the best fit. Yeah, meeting transcription tools, marketing automation, corporate LMS training. You can see some of these I haven't even thought of, like church management software. HR software, et cetera. For the sake of the tutorial, we'll just go ahead and move forward with construction estimating software. So what I would do is I would then reply, yes, I want to go with construction estimating software. Let's save this into niche MD. And Claude Code will actually take this information. It will create a new file. We'll open up the tutorial. And we'll see it. So this will allow us to continuously move forward and save the understanding of the model so it knows, or what the AI knows, what we want to do. So now it has come back and made the niche.md file, and we can see it here. So if we open it, we can see it. This is Markdown, and it's just giving an overview of everything that it's found for this niche and why it made this decision. So now we're going to go to the next step, which is we're going to go ahead and type /clear. And what this does is it resets the context of the model. If we really wanted to, we could do /new as well, which is the same. So now what we'll do is we'll use the next tool, which is find domain. And what this tool will do, or this prompt, will actually go through and find us a domain that matches niche.md. And this tool will take anywhere between 3 to 5 minutes to find us an actual brandable, spellable .com domain name that we can actually register today. Okay, so the tool finished and it came back with 10 recommended domains that it is claiming is all available. So As an example, I'm not actually going to register any of these, but say that we bidpine.com. Go ahead and copy this and we'll paste it into register a domain, and we can see that this domain is available. So bidpine.com we can get for $10.46 per year on Cloudflare. So the next step is we'll say I like bidpine.com. Let's save that to niche.md, and this will update the niche.md so we have a running file of memory. Okay, so it did mention in there to set up WordPress. We can clean that up, but what we'll do now is we'll go ahead and clear it again. What we're going to run now is we're going to create a silo. Now what this does is it is an SEO technique that sets up the content of the site or the site structure in such a way that it allows multiple parent navigation. So we'll see what this actually creates, but it will actually create the website with some of the SEO best practices, and this is how it will actually structure the content. So it's going to go through, do more research, and actually find out what topics we should actually cover. So I'll let this run and we'll get back to it after this is done. Okay, so it's created the silo structure, and I will say yes, go ahead and create the file. And we can see that it now has silo.md created as well. So we can go ahead and open this. We can just briefly look through it. Some of these URLs are a bit long, but it looks pretty good. So the next step we'll do is once again, we'll clear once again. And the reason we keep clearing is because if these models, they have a limit in terms of how much context. So it's essentially how much can they store in memory. And if you start to use too much of the context all in just one chain of continuously talking to the AI, the more the context gets filled up, the more mistakes they start to make. So we want to keep the tasks that we have the AI doing very specific. So the next one we're going to do is we are actually going to have it design now the site, and we are going to pass in niche.md and silo.md. And this will come back and it will likely ask us some questions. There might be enough information in niche.md and silo.md that it doesn't have any. But as you can see, it's getting all that context that it needs back. So it's asking, what is the primary goal for bidpine.com? We could go lead generation. So it says optimize for affiliate clicks, ad revenue plus affiliate. Let's go ahead and go with recommended. So it's asking the type of style. Let's go ahead and go with industrial and professional. Now I know I keep clicking through these fairly quickly. When I'm actually building sites not for a tutorial, I actually do a lot more research, actually getting the niche correct, making sure that everything— like actually read through the silo structure and everything. That is where the work comes in on our part. So I want a full design system homepage plus pillar Template system. Let's just do homepage and pillar template. And if we go ahead and open this up, we'll actually be able to see it. I believe this is still running. Let's see. I'll run Hugo server one more time. So what's happening now is this prompt is actually going through and designing essentially the entire site. So it's really focused on the theme, but this will actually create the website and it should look pretty good the first time. Now, once it creates that first mock, you can go through and actually chat with the AI and actually tell it different changes that you want. So as long as you have different ideas at which you want the AI to do, AI is extremely powerful. It can actually do all of the work in the backend to actually bring your ideas to life. And that's why this is extremely powerful. The other great thing is this is running and it's done so far. It has done all the research to find a niche. It has found a domain for us and it has created a silo structure. So it knows what content that we actually need to create. And it's done all of that all in just one terminal window. And the great thing about this is if you have the higher plans and more usage, you can actually have multiple of these running at once. And so you can start to see the power of how quickly you can create things with AI that has the potential to actually start generating new revenue. And one thing I will say is even if your first idea isn't the best or whatever it provides, just going through the steps and actually learning how to actually build something and seeing it actually create it, that is extremely powerful because you will be ahead of the majority of people The majority of people right now are simply just using ChatGPT in the chat box and asking it questions like it's Google. There's not many people that are actually using it and sitting here and using skills to actually focus the AI to do a specific task and do it one step at a time. But it will take a bit of time. So I'll go ahead and fast forward the video until it's done. Okay, so the AI has finished and we can see here on the left, this is what it created. So you can see with those prompts, this doesn't look like a very generic site. It actually looks unique to the niche and it has already created a lot of content. And this is the silo structure that I was talking about. I guess some of them are missing. That's okay. A lot of them are missing. And so what we can do is we can say, hey, buy trade. Reviews, Compare, and Guides are all missing. Let's go ahead and make page templates for those as well. And the reason I believe it skipped it was because it actually had asked me at one point, if you recall, if you wanted me to make those templates as well, and I had skipped it. See if the Find Software works. So this works, and And now we actually have a site that has content on it. Now, to be fair, I would actually go through this and make the content better. That is one thing that I definitely would recommend. This is all AI-generated content, so you'd want to actually go through and make sure that all this information is correct. You could go through and find different data, different— like on different YouTube videos, people in the comments talking about different construction estimating software on Reddit and all that and start to compile all that information. And you can actually feed it to the AI to actually make more valuable insights into this. And you can be very transparent about it on the site saying that you personally don't use any of this software, that you have compiled and researched everything that you could to help contractors find the best estimating software in 2026. Obviously, if you are in the construction industry and you are using estimating software, that would be even better because you could add your own unique insights and make the content even more valuable. But if you can see just how quickly we were able to create an asset. So now with this, we have a foundation that we can actually use to actually sign up to these different softwares and affiliate networks and begin to have a site that actually has the potential to generate revenue. And from here, we can use the AI to sit here and say, I don't know if this quiz works, probably not. It does not. We can actually go through and say, let's go ahead and make this quiz actually valuable and actually make a useful tool. So the great thing about AI is, again, you can go through and you can make things extremely quickly. It's just going to use a little bit of creativity. Using AI to both research and help identify different gaps in the market, and then using you as the human operator to then guide AI to actually create the things that you want with the proper context that it needs to actually be able to create things that you're looking for. So it's still going, and you can see that it has made different templates for this. As I said, going forward, what I would do is I would go through this and I would tell the AI specifically, oh, I want this changed. So for example, this doesn't look very good to me. So what I would say is, this is a table, I can tell, but it's not styled very well. So let's say, let's make tables styled to match the rest of the site. So as simple as that. And because right now this particular AI was focused on designing the site, it already has the context of, okay, what does the site look like? What is it that I need to do? And so it should very quickly sit here and update this to make it more thematic to the rest of the site. The other thing is, again, I would go through and make sure that the content is up to par, but now I want to refresh. That table looks pretty good. So how do we actually get this online now that it is created? So if we go back to our other terminal, what we do is you do Ctrl+C. This is the one that's running Hugo server. That's how we're able to see this locally. So do Ctrl+C. And what we will do is we'll do Hugo build and then we add the base URL. Which will be in this case bidpine.com. We do that and it built the entire site. So now we open up the folder and in the folder under tutorial, which is where the site was, we now have the public folder. It now has the entire site built. So what we can do is we'll go to Cloudflare real quick and we can create a new application. And for this one, we'll just do upload static files. And what I do is I right-click on public and I will compress it as a public.zip. And then I could just drag this over and it's going to give a worker name. This doesn't matter too much because what we can do once we deploy it is we can actually If we were actually to purchase bidpine.com, what we could do is under settings here, now that it's created it under domains and routes, what we would do is we would just click add and click add domain. And we would just type in bidpine.com and click add domain down here. And this thing would be all set up. Currently it is on SuperQueen. So if we go here and go to SuperQueen, we can see that the site is hosted. And everything is working. So again, that is how you build a site extremely quickly using AI. I just created them in such a way that hopefully makes this as simple as possible to get your first website or your first asset really online created with AI. There are definitely other ways to do niche research. There are other ways to find different domains and everything. If you like this workflow, then keep using it. But as you're working through this, just go through the steps so you can start to learn how this all works. And then as you get better, start to adapt your workflow to whatever processes work best for you. So again, if you want access to the skills, all the skills that I used, there's a link in the description down below. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments and please subscribe to my channel 'cause I will be making many more videos and tutorials on exactly how I'm using AI to build different web assets and just trying to stay ahead of the game in terms of how quickly AI is changing all of our lives. Until next time.