A few weeks ago I decided I wanted my own little corner of the internet — a proper address, a real email, a website with my name on it. Nothing fancy. But I hadn’t written a line of code in years, and I had no desire to start again. So I tried something different: I just asked Claude.

Claude is an AI assistant made by Anthropic. Think of it as a very capable helper you can have a conversation with — one that happens to know a great deal about computers, websites, and how things work on the internet. Rather than learning all of that myself, I simply described what I wanted in plain language, and Claude did the rest.

First: a proper email address

I already owned the domain seppanen.eu — I’d had it registered for years, sitting unused. My first goal was to get a proper email address there. I wanted pasi@seppanen.eu, something that looked like it belonged to a real person rather than a free webmail account.

The catch: actually running your own email server is notoriously complicated. Instead, the trick is to set up forwarding — any email sent to your custom address gets quietly redirected to an inbox you already use. I told Claude what I wanted, and within a few minutes it had walked me through exactly which settings to change at my domain registrar. I clicked the buttons it described. It worked first try.

Then: an actual website

With email sorted, I turned to the bigger goal: a website. I wanted something at seppanen.eu that felt like it was mine. Not a template, not a drag-and-drop builder — something genuinely made for me.

GitHub Pages is a free service that hosts simple websites directly from a code repository. It sounds technical, and in truth it is — but I didn’t have to understand any of it. I told Claude “I want a website hosted for free with a custom domain”, and it guided me through the whole thing step by step: setting up a GitHub account, creating a repository, writing the initial page, configuring the settings so the site would appear at my domain instead of some generic GitHub address.

At one point there was a warning about some software versions being out of date. Claude spotted it, explained what it meant in plain English, checked the latest available versions, and updated everything — all while I watched. When the DNS records needed changing so my domain would point to the right place, Claude looked at the settings panel with me and confirmed that everything was already correct from a previous setup.

What this actually felt like

The experience was genuinely strange, in a good way. I’ve always thought of building a website as something that requires a certain kind of technical fluency — a language I never fully learned. This felt more like having a knowledgeable friend sitting next to me, one who speaks both “normal person” and “computer” fluently, translating between the two as needed.

I made decisions. Claude executed them. The whole thing — email setup, website, domain configuration, getting HTTPS working — took an afternoon. None of it required me to understand the underlying machinery. I just had to know what I wanted.

The page you’re reading right now is the result. It was written by me, designed and built by Claude, hosted for free, and lives at an address that’s been mine for years but never had anything at it — until now.