Building a Site Start to Finish
This is a member-only chapter. Log in with your Signal Over Noise membership email to continue.
Log in to readModule 6 · Section 6 of 7
Building a Site Start to Finish
The workflow across all eight of my sites follows this pattern:
- Scaffold —
npm create astro@latest, empty template, TypeScript yes. - CLAUDE.md — Write it before writing any code. Describe the project, the structure, the commands, the rules.
- Design tokens — Write
src/styles/global.csswith colour, typography, and spacing variables. - Base layout — One layout that wraps every page. Get this right before building pages.
- Index page — The homepage, using the layout. Enough content to see the design working.
- Components — Header, footer, any repeated UI. Each one generated with a prompt that references existing components.
- Content — Collections defined, schema written, first few entries added.
- Additional pages — Blog index, about, contact. Each one follows the established layout pattern.
- SEO preflight — Check titles, descriptions, OG tags.
- Deploy — Cloudflare Pages or VPS, depending on the project.
Steps 2 and 3 are where most people skip ahead. Don’t. The CLAUDE.md and the design tokens are what make every subsequent step faster. They’re the foundation that Claude Code builds on.