The starting point
My site hadn’t really changed since 2014. “The shoemaker’s children go barefoot”, as the proverb goes. I kept doing SEO, Italian SEO campaigns and a lot of web development. Clients kept coming, and I was so busy that I neglected my own international website, which became outrageously outdated!
Meanwhile my work and passions had moved on: I started studying coding with Python, then AI, machine learning, deep learning, data science… I built a lot of projects, some for clients too, but I had never showcased them. Then, in October 2026, I decided to apply for an AI development role that I found particularly exciting, and suddenly I needed a place to show my work. Time to show off! But the website needed a long-overdue redesign, along with a painful cleanup of content at least twelve years old. I had about ten days.
Claude and I started by discussing some principles and values to drive the whole project, a few inspiring taglines and a core story:
- Integrity first
- Honesty about what’s actually built
- The human before the machine
- Meaning at the center of it all
As it became clearer and clearer, it’s not about delegating everything to AI. It’s an interaction that speeds up the work, but it should never take the human out of the loop.
The setup
Everything lived in one Claude Project, “Jonathanseo.com”. Its instructions held the essentials every chat needed to know:
- the positioning;
- the design system (colours, fonts, logo);
- the content plan, built from 16 months of Search Console data;
- how I like to work: one step at a time, short replies, and exact code replacements instead of whole files.
Project memory added the facts that keep coming back, like how to phrase my degrees in English.
Then came the most useful piece: a living Redesign Overview doc, connected to every chat through the Docs connector. It records every decision, the site structure, what’s done and what’s open. Each chat reads it before starting and updates it when it’s done, so no chat works from old information.
One chat per job
Instead of one endless conversation, I gave each big task its own chat inside the Project:
- Positioning & design. This chat started it all, from the new positioning to the hero copy, the style and the contact section. It also created the overview doc.
- Content cleanup. I fed it 16 months of Search Console data, a backlinks export and the sitemap. The rule: pages with real backlinks get a 301 redirect, and pages with no impressions and no backlinks get a 410. Twelve years of travel updates became a new /where/ timeline.
- Page rewrites. Whenever a page needed extra focus, it got its own chat. That’s how the About and Services pages came about, along with a rewrite plan for my old Italian SEO page.
- Projects. The Projects section is a very nice addition to the new website, and each project is written from the actual code on my laptop (or on a production server). Claude Code reads the code and drafts an overview .md file, and we write the page from that.
Each chat stayed focused, and none had to carry the whole history. The overview doc held everything together. Even though, I admit, things sometimes get mixed up, and a chat ends up doing another chat’s job (like coding a section while we’re still talking about it).
The tools around it
The chats did the thinking and the writing. Other tools did the rest:
- Claude Code wrote some of the code, but mostly handled the debugging and the code cleanup on the theme.
- Linked to my computer through the Claude desktop app, some chats could read and edit the theme files in my local WordPress install directly.
- Claude in Chrome checked the live site: status codes after every redirect, and whether a change had really gone live.
- Gemini made most of the project images, all in one style: a realistic object on a saffron background.
- ChatGPT had its moment in the sun too, retouching some of my photos. Not AI-generated images of me, just small fixes like closing a shirt or adjusting the lighting.
And have a look at the 404 and 410 pages. I’m very proud of them! 🙂
What shipped
A new WordPress theme with a new design, built around a new positioning: SEO & AI Development. For the rest, just look around. When you read this, it might still be a work in progress, but the shoemaker’s children finally have shoes.