How I Built My Author Website With AI: The Exact Process, The Exact Prompts, The Exact Architecture
What a web agency would charge $10,000 for. What I did for $20 per month. The full walkthrough — tools, prompts, architecture decisions — available to paid subscribers of The Elysian Press.
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This week on The Elysian Press, paid subscribers receive the complete build walkthrough: how I built nikitadatar.com using Claude, what a web agency would have charged for the same result, the exact prompts that generated the canonical URL architecture and SEO metadata structure, and the specific decisions I made along the way.
What Is Inside This Week's Paid Post
The tools and their roles. Claude for code generation and architectural reasoning. Next.js 15 (App Router) for the website framework. Vercel for zero-configuration deployment. Gray-matter for Markdown blog post parsing. Why these tools and not others — and what each one costs.
The architecture decisions. Why canonical URL structure is built into the site at the framework level, not added as an afterthought. How the blog post frontmatter system (YAML gray-matter) generates all SEO metadata, Open Graph tags, and structured data automatically from fields in each article. How the sitemap generates itself.
The exact prompts. Not paraphrased descriptions of what I said — the actual prompt text that generated the working canonical URL logic, the metadata generation function, the blog list page with pagination, and the structured data for Google's rich results. With annotations explaining what each prompt was designed to accomplish and why it worked.
What I got wrong and had to fix. The three architecture decisions I made early that required rebuilding. What the errors looked like and how I corrected them.
The cost comparison. A breakdown of what the same build — canonical URL architecture, proper metadata structure, JSON-LD structured data, automatic sitemap, Markdown-based content management, custom blog styling — would cost from:
- A web development agency (U.S. market, 2025)
- A freelance developer (Upwork, 2025)
- What I paid (tools and hosting)
What this doesn't require. The post is written for someone with no prior coding experience who knows what they want their website to do. You don't need to understand Next.js before reading it. You need to be willing to copy prompts into Claude, read the output, and paste generated code into files.
This Builds on This Week's Free Post
→ Why Writers Who Don't Own Their Platform Are Building Someone Else's Business — the case for platform ownership, canonical pages, and why AI makes this accessible for the first time
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Monthly: $7 / Year: $70 / Founding Member: $55 per year (first 100 spots)
This post connects to The Life That Is Already Yours — on building the platform and the work that are already becoming possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is The Elysian Press?
- The Elysian Press is Nikita Datar's Substack newsletter publishing weekly posts on psychology, healing, astrology, and building. Paid subscribers receive The Atelier series each Thursday — complete frameworks, practices, working prompts, and tools.
- What tools were used to build nikitadatar.com?
- The core stack: Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) for all code generation and architecture decisions; Next.js 15 (App Router) for the website framework; Vercel for hosting and deployment; gray-matter for Markdown blog post parsing; and Tailwind CSS for styling. Total monthly cost: $20 (Vercel Pro plan). No agency, no freelancer, no prior coding experience required for the concepts — though familiarity with what you want the site to do is necessary to prompt effectively.
Recommended resources
A few relevant resources I would actually recommend for this topic.
- The Life That Is Already Yours — Nikita Datar — On building the systems and the work that are already becoming possible
- You Are Not Fine — Nikita Datar — On seeing clearly what is running your decisions — including the decision to not build
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click a link and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
I wrote more about this in The Life That Is Already Yours — The Neuroscience, Psychology, and Hidden Cost of Not Choosing Yourself.
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