A personal website is one of those things everyone means to get around to. A freelancer wants somewhere to point clients besides Instagram. A photographer wants a real home for their portfolio. Someone job-hunting wants a page that's just them, not a resume PDF. And then it sits on the to-do list for months, because "building a website" sounds like a bigger project than it actually is.

It isn't, if you keep it to what a personal site actually needs.

What a personal website actually needs

Most personal sites people put off building only need a handful of things:

  • A short bio — who you are and what you do, in your own voice
  • Examples of your work, or a gallery if that fits what you do
  • A way to get in touch — email, a contact form, or a link to socials
  • Enough visual personality that it feels like you, not a template

That's genuinely it for a first version. No blog is required to start. No booking system, no e-commerce, no ten-page structure. The instinct to add "just one more section" before launching is usually what turns an afternoon project into a six-month one.

The fastest real option: describe it to Claude

This is where SiteMCP comes in. It's a tool that connects to Claude and lets you build an actual, live website by describing it in plain conversation — no page-builder to learn, no theme to fight with.

You'd start with something like:

Make a personal page for me — I'm a freelance photographer based in Chicago, mostly portraits and events.

Claude creates the site and a home page around that description. From there, you keep going the same way:

Add a gallery page with a grid of my recent work, and change the color scheme to warm, muted tones.

Each message updates the actual live site — there's no separate publish step, and no code involved anywhere in the process. If a photo needs replacing or the wording feels off, you say so, the same way you'd give a note to a designer, except you get the result back in the same conversation.

Before you start, have this ready

You'll move through it faster with a few things already decided:

  • A couple of sentences about what you do and who you do it for
  • Whatever photos or work samples you want to show (or you can generate images if you don't have them yet)
  • A rough idea of the mood — minimal, bold, warm, playful, whatever fits
  • How you want people to reach you

None of this has to be final. It's much easier to react to a real first draft — "make it warmer," "that photo's too big" — than to stare at a blank page trying to plan the whole site before you've built anything.

What it costs

SiteMCP works on a simple top-up balance rather than a subscription — no auto-renewal to remember to cancel. New accounts get 30 days free automatically, no card required, so you can build the actual site before deciding whether to keep it live. After that it's a few dollars a month per site, roughly the cost of a coffee.

If you've been meaning to get a personal site up for a while, the honest bar to clear is low: a couple of sentences about yourself and an afternoon is enough to get a real, live version — one you can keep improving from there, rather than waiting for a perfect plan that never quite gets started.