Before you begin — about this guide

— Build your own site with AI, and publish it to the world —

What this guide is for

We have come a long way through the earlier parts.

Foundations covered how to meet generative AI, the differences between the major tools, prompt patterns, and GPTs and Gems, and gave you a feel for AI as intellectual training wheels. Working with Your Own Files took a step further, from chat to workspace: handing files to AI, growing a knowledge base, and reaching the doorway of a world where AI operates files itself. At the end of that guide, we laid out a map:

Beyond this lie tool building with AI (vibe coding), websites and landing pages, and building and automating work systems.

This guide actually walks the rest of that map. Its theme is

building your own website with AI, and publishing it to the world

Two concrete goals: build a profile page, grow it into a website, and finally publish it at a URL anyone can reach, using a service called Vercel.

"Coding" and "building systems" may sound like the sudden arrival of a specialist world. Be reassured: in this guide you will not write a single line of code yourself. The AI writes the code. What you do is give precise instructions, check what comes back, and decide when to put it into the world. That is, it sits on the same line as everything you have already learned about working with AI.

And once you cross this, the view changes completely. When an idea arrives, you find yourself on the side that thinks "how shall I build it?" rather than "who do I have to ask?" That is the change this guide wants to deliver.

What you should come away with

• An understanding of the difference between an AI chat and an AI development tool, and the ability to pick the one that suits you
• Knowing how to set up a safe working environment before letting AI write code
• Patterns for instructing AI, and patterns for dealing with errors
• A profile page you actually built, with your hands and the AI's
• Your work stored on GitHub, giving you a backup and a base for publishing
• A site published to the world with Vercel
• A grounded sense of what "front end" and "back end" mean, so you can read AI output structurally
• The ability to build a full website, and a map of what comes next: booking forms, work tools, landing pages for self-funded rehabilitation

Who this is written for

• Therapists who have finished Working with Your Own Files and want to step over to the making side
• People who have had AI write text and documents, but feel websites and tools are a different world
• People who want their own base for publishing, for self-funded rehabilitation, freelance work or running a community
• People who find commissioning a website expensive and want to shape something themselves first
• People who eventually want booking forms and work systems, and want the ground under them first

If you already develop for the web yourself, much of this will feel basic. It is written as a bridge across to the making side.

You can follow this guide without having read Working with Your Own Files, but the thinking about safety continues directly from Chapter 2 of that guide, so if you feel uneasy, reading it first will help.

How to read it

• Read from Part 1 in order. Each chapter is the ground for the next.
• Each chapter ends with a "try this" and a summary. Please read with your hands actually moving on your own computer.
• The screens, features, limits and prices described are as of the time of writing (2026). AI and development tools move quickly, so details will change. The underlying way of thinking changes far more slowly.
• This guide does not cover external service integration (APIs), or login and database features of the kind a social network needs. Those appear as "the map ahead" near the end, and are covered from the beginning in a later part.

How it is organised

Four parts.

• Part 1 | Foundations — From user to maker. What an AI development tool is, and how to prepare to build safely.
• Part 2 | Practice — Learn the patterns for instructing AI, and actually build a profile page.
• Part 3 | Publishing — Store it on GitHub, and publish to the world with Vercel.
• Part 4 | Going further — Grow it into a full site, understand front end and back end, and draw the map ahead.

Let us begin.