How I Rebuilt My Website With AI — Design, SEO, and Claude CoWork

I’d been putting off rebuilding quickdev.co.il for way too long. The brand was fine — logo, colors, all good. The site just felt stale and I finally sat down to do something about it. What surprised me was how different the process felt when you bring the right AI tools into the workflow from the very beginning.

This isn’t a post about AI doing the work for you. It’s about what happens when you treat AI as a real collaborator — from design through content strategy to code — and what that actually produces.

Starting With Design (Finally)

My default move is to open VS Code before I even know what I’m building. Bad habit. This time I went to Stitch by Google first — brought in my existing brand colors and logo, and figured out what each page should actually look like. Layout, sections, flow. Real decisions made visually before touching any code.

By the end I had actual page designs I could point at. That mattered more than I expected.

Setting Up the Project in Claude CoWork

I exported everything from Stitch into a project folder and set it up in Claude CoWork — Anthropic’s desktop tool that gives Claude persistent access to your files. Not snippets in a chat. The actual project files, sitting there, available the whole time.

Before we wrote a single line of code I gave Claude a clear mandate: treat SEO and GEO as a first-class concern throughout the entire build.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is about making sure AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews can understand and cite your site, not just rank it in traditional search. I wanted both, baked in from the start, not added as an afterthought.

Claude Pushed Back (In a Good Way)

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Claude wasn’t just executing designs — it was thinking about the site strategically.

It suggested pages I hadn’t designed. An About page. Dedicated service pages. SEO-supporting sections that wouldn’t be obvious from the visual design but would make the site make more sense to search engines and AI models crawling it. For each suggestion it gave me a rough mock so I had something to react to.

We went back and forth. Some things made it in, some got cut. The “How We Work” section went through a few rounds. Certain service descriptions got trimmed. It felt less like prompting a tool and more like working through it with someone who knew what they were doing.

The content strategy layer — figuring out what to put on the site and why — turned out to be as valuable as the actual coding.

Use the Built-in Skills. Seriously.

CoWork has a plugin system with pre-built Skills, and I want to call this out because I think most people skip it entirely.

I installed the Marketing and Product Management plugins. Both come with pre-built Skills for content drafting, messaging strategy, competitive briefs, specs — the kind of thinking that comes up constantly when you’re building a website that needs to actually do something for your business.

At several points during the build I’d stop and invoke a marketing skill mid-session to work through how a page should be positioned, or use a product management skill to think through what a particular section was really trying to achieve. It keeps the content grounded in actual intent instead of drifting into polished-sounding filler.

Don’t treat CoWork like a code editor with a chat window. Install the plugins. Use the Skills.

CLAUDE.md — Set It Up Early

I also set up a CLAUDE.md file — a project-level instruction file Claude reads at the start of every session. The SEO/GEO mandate went in there. Component conventions, tone of voice, structural decisions we’d already made. Every new session opened with all of that loaded, so nothing had to be re-explained.

If you’re doing any extended project in CoWork, write your CLAUDE.md early and keep it updated. It’s the difference between a coherent build and a series of disconnected conversations.

The Stack: Astro + Vercel

Astro for the site — it generates clean, semantic HTML, ships zero JavaScript by default, and is genuinely great for SEO. Vercel for hosting on the free plan. The two work seamlessly together, deployment is instant, and you get production-level performance without a hosting bill.

For a content-focused site where SEO matters, this combination is hard to beat.

What I’d Actually Take Away From This

The SEO and GEO work was more interesting than I thought it would be. It wasn’t just about clean markup and meta tags — it was about thinking through what pages should exist, what questions they answer, and how the site’s structure communicates what quickdev is about to both search engines and AI systems.

Doing that work with Claude, rather than figuring it out alone, produced a genuinely different result. And the best sessions weren’t “here’s a design, build it.” They were “here’s what I’m going for — what am I missing?”

That shift in how you use the tool is worth getting comfortable with.

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Want to Build Something Like This?

If you’re thinking about rebuilding your site, launching a new one, or just want to understand how an AI-first development workflow actually looks in practice — let’s talk. This is exactly the kind of process we bring to client projects too.

Book a free 30-minute call at quickdev.co.il

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quickdev builds custom software for Israeli startups and international companies. We specialize in fast, focused development — MVPs, SaaS products, and sites that are built to perform. Learn more at quickdev.co.il.