1. Abstract
For most of the last fifteen years, building a website meant picking a CMS, fighting a theme, and accepting the maintenance debt that came with it. This workshop builds the alternative in a single morning, from an empty folder to a live site.

Artem and his team run their sites without a CMS in the loop. AI drives the design system: typography, spacing, colour, the component set. Astro turns that into a static site with SEO, schema, accessibility and performance handled by default. Cloudflare Pages publishes it for free with git integration, so every change to the site is a commit. And because the site is plain files in git, an AI agent can be given the job the CMS used to do: writing and updating pages, opening a change for review, and shipping it once approved.

Participants build their own site during the session. They will leave with a deployed URL, a repository, a design system generated from a brief, an agent set up to edit the site, and the parts most teams skip: structured data, a crawler policy that invites AI answer engines in, and a hosting bill that rounds to zero.

This is a working session, not a vision deck. It is built for people who ship websites: in-house marketing teams, freelancers, and small agencies whose day-to-day is still WordPress or a heavy CMS.

2. Agenda
Four hours of taught content, 09:00 to 13:30, in three blocks with two short breaks, followed by an open clinic to 15:30.

Block 1, 09:00 to 10:20: From nothing to a live URL

• Why CMS-free, in five minutes. The talk on 11 November makes the full case
• Environment check: GitHub, Cloudflare, the AI tool
• An Astro project from zero 
• First deploy to Cloudflare Pages
• Everyone ends this block with a live site on their own URL

Block 2, 10:35 to 11:55: A design system and real pages

• Turning a written brief into a design system: typography, spacing, colour, components
• What AI is genuinely good at here, and where Artem still writes it by hand
• Astro content collections: how the content is modelled without a database
• Building the first real pages
• Everyone ends this block with a working site, the whole cycle proven end to end

Block 3, 12:10 to 13:30: The agent takes over
The instructions file that tells an agent how this specific site works

• An agent adds and edits a page, and opens the change for review
• Review, merge, automatic deploy
• Who is allowed to touch what: giving a non-technical colleague a safe way in
• Before you leave: SEO, structured data and a crawler policy that lets AI answer engines in, and what the site costs to run

Open clinic, 13:30 to 17:00

• Drop-in, no new material. The trainer stays in the room for anyone who wants to keep building, finish what they started, or ask about their own site

The build is the whole session. The strategic case, hosting costs at scale, and where the approach does not fit are covered in the talk on 11 November, so the workshop spends its time on making the thing work.

3. Objectives
By the end of the session, each participant has:

• A live website on their own URL, built by them during the session, hosted for free
• A Git repository they own, with the full history of the day in it
• A design system generated from a brief, and the judgment to know when to override it
• An AI agent configured to write and update that site, with a review step before anything ships
• SEO, structured data and a crawler policy in place from day one, not bolted on later
• An honest read on what the site costs to run

4. Target audience and Prerequisites
Audience. In-house marketing teams, freelancers, and small agencies who build and maintain websites, and who are currently doing it on WordPress or another heavy CMS. Founders who own their company's site directly.

This session is for people who already use AI tools in their work and want to see how far that goes for a real website. No prior Astro experience is needed and no coding background is required, but someone who has never used an AI assistant will spend the day catching up rather than building.

Four hours moves fast. Attendees who arrive without the setup below will not finish the build, so the prerequisites are not a formality here.

Prerequisites. Bring a laptop (macOS, Windows or Linux) with:

• A GitHub account (free)
• A Cloudflare account (free)
• Node.js installed
• An AI coding assistant of their choice, set up and working before the session. Any of the current tools will do, and a paid plan is worth having for the day: the free tiers run out quickly under this kind of use

Comfort opening a terminal and running a command someone gives you is enough. No coding experience is required, and nobody has to write code from scratch.