Building a professional website used to mean either paying a monthly fee to Wix or Squarespace (roughly £300/year), or hiring a freelancer and watching the budget spiral. There’s a third option that most people don’t know about — and it costs £1.19 for an entire year of hosting.
Why Not Just Use a Website Builder?
Website builders are convenient, but they come with a set of trade-offs that get worse over time:
- You don’t own the code. If the company pivots, raises prices, or shuts down, you’re left scrambling.
- You’re locked in. Moving off Wix means rebuilding from scratch elsewhere.
- The AI advantage doesn’t compound. Proprietary tools can’t benefit from improvements in open AI models the way real code can.
The approach in this guide uses open technologies — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and the Astro framework. That means the AI models available today (and the better ones coming tomorrow) work brilliantly with your codebase. You own it outright. Nobody can price-hike you out of your own website.
What You’ll Build
A fast, modern static website — perfect for:
- Author and portfolio sites
- Business landing pages
- Marketing and content-heavy sites
- Any site where you want to link out to a third-party for transactions (Amazon, Eventbrite, Gumroad)
Note: This approach isn’t the right fit for a full e-commerce store with checkout. For everything else, it’s more than adequate.
The Full Stack (All Free or Near-Free)
| Tool | Purpose | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Antigravity | AI coding assistant | Free |
| Node.js | Runtime for web tooling | Free |
| GitHub | Code storage + version control | Free |
| Cloudflare | DNS management + hosting | Free |
| Fasthosts (or any registrar) | Domain name purchase | ~£1.19/year |
Step 1: Set Up Your Computer
Install two things before anything else:
- Antigravity — available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. This is the AI coding environment you’ll use to build and modify the site.
- Node.js — the runtime engine that powers most modern web tooling.
Then create three accounts (logging in with Google simplifies everything):
- Google — for the AI model powering Antigravity
- GitHub — for storing your code in the cloud
- Cloudflare — for DNS management and automated deployments
Step 2: Buy and Transfer Your Domain
Buy your domain from a registrar like Fasthosts — cheap introductory offers are common. Don’t buy domain guard, because Cloudflare includes that protection for free.
Once purchased, transfer DNS control to Cloudflare:
- In Cloudflare, go to Domains → Transfers and click Onboard a domain
- Type in your new domain name and select the free plan
- Cloudflare will give you two nameserver addresses
- Go back to your registrar, navigate to Nameservers, and replace the existing ones with the two Cloudflare nameservers
- Make sure DNSSEC is off (since you didn’t buy domain guard)
- Click I’ve updated my nameservers
DNS propagation typically takes 20 minutes or less in practice, even if it warns you up to 24 hours.
Step 3: Build the Website with AI
Open Antigravity, click Open Agent Manager, and create a new workspace — this is just a folder where your code will live. Name it after your website.
Prompting the AI
Switch to Planning mode and select the latest Gemini model (the “Low” tier is more than adequate for website work). Then write a prompt that describes your site as if you’re briefing an actual web designer.
Here’s the kind of prompt that works well:
You are a senior web designer and web conversion specialist. Create a website for [Name], an author with four books on Amazon. I will provide links, descriptions, and book cover images. I will also provide the author bio and headshot.
Features:
- Homepage hero section displaying the most recent book (make this configurable)
- Below the fold: the other books, each taking roughly full viewport height and width
- An About page with author bio and image
- A blog with a sample post — she writes psychological thrillers
Design: minimalist, typical of author websites. Slightly atmospheric but not overdone.
Use Astro.js.
The last line is important. Make sure your prompt specifies Astro.js — it’s the ideal framework for static sites like this, and the AI may not choose it unprompted.
Review the Plan
In Planning mode, the AI presents a plan before building anything. Review it, catch anything you’ve missed, then let it run. Expect it to take 5–10 minutes.
Preview the Result
Once it’s done, open the terminal (three dots → Toggle Terminal) and run:
npm run devThen open localhost:4321 in your browser. You’ll have a working website with placeholder content.
Step 4: Add Your Real Content
Create a folder inside your project (I use __source) and drop in all your assets:
- Book cover images (name them close to the book titles)
- A headshot or author photo
- Amazon links (just the clean URL — everything before
/ref=) - Book descriptions and author bio (Amazon product pages are a good source)
Then tell the agent what you’ve provided and where to find it. It’ll wire everything up. If a link is broken, just tell it — switch to Fast mode for small fixes and it’ll make the change without needing a full plan.
Step 5: Push to GitHub
In Antigravity, go to Source Control (left sidebar) and click Initialize Repository. It’ll ask for a commit message — click Generate to have it written for you automatically.
Then click Publish Branch and sign in with GitHub when prompted. Authorize Antigravity to access your account, and the code will be pushed to a new private repository.
Step 6: Deploy with Cloudflare Pages
This is where continuous deployment gets set up — meaning every future change you push to GitHub will automatically go live on your website within minutes.
- In Cloudflare, go to Build → Workers & Pages
- Click Create an application → Deploy Pages → Import an existing Git repository
- Connect your GitHub account and select your repository
- Set the framework to Astro
- Leave everything else as default and hit Save and Deploy
Cloudflare will build the site and give you a preview URL (something like yoursite.pages.dev). Share it, test it, send it to a client — it’s real and accessible.
Step 7: Connect Your Custom Domain
- Inside your Cloudflare project, click Custom Domains → Set up a custom domain
- Type in your domain (e.g.,
yourdomain.com) - Click Activate domain
Because you transferred DNS control to Cloudflare earlier, this is a single click. Within a few minutes, your domain is live and pointing at your new site.
The Ongoing Workflow
From here, making changes is simple:
- Open Antigravity and chat with the agent — “write me a new blog post about…”, “change the font to…”, “fix the link on the about page”
- Accept the changes
- Commit and sync to GitHub (Source Control → Sync)
- Cloudflare automatically picks up the push, builds, and deploys
The whole cycle — change to live — typically takes a few minutes.
What This Actually Costs
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Domain (year one, introductory price) | ~£1.19 |
| Cloudflare hosting | Free |
| GitHub | Free |
| Antigravity | Free |
| Total (year one) | ~£1.19 |
Subsequent years will run around £15 for the domain renewal — still a fraction of any website builder subscription.
The Bigger Picture
What you end up with isn’t just a cheap website. You end up with:
- Full ownership of the code and the domain
- No vendor lock-in — the code is portable, standard, and readable by any developer
- AI leverage that compounds — as models improve, so does your ability to make changes
- A workflow that makes you genuinely capable of maintaining and growing the site yourself
My wife has been doing it independently. She’s not a developer. The tooling has reached the point where that’s genuinely possible — and that’s the part that still surprises me.
If you get stuck anywhere in this process, drop a question in the YouTube comments — I’m personally going through and answering every one.