Build the style guide before the website
Today’s call ended with me building a style guide live in Claude Code, using a member’s site as the example.
He’d just finished his site with AI and asked how to make it look less vibe coded. My answer was a style guide first. Impeccable will do a really polished AI slop if you don’t give it better input before anything happens. If you don’t direct it, it’ll invent it and fill in the blanks.
So before any pages, I make a style guide with everything tokenized: colors, typography, buttons, inputs, cards, light mode, dark mode. It’s easier to fix a style guide than to reshape a whole website that’s wide open. Then the site follows the conventions, and if I change a color or a button size, I change it in the style guide and it’s everywhere. That’s how my own site was built, and the Wild North Gear store we just shipped.
On the call I pointed Claude Code at his site and told it to ask me questions until it was about 95% confident in the direction, then use Impeccable to shape it. A few minutes later we had a design system page with his colors, type, components and tokens. On a client project I’d spend the rest of the day shaping it from there.
After that you always reference the style guide. Pages, blog posts, Instagram graphics, ads. It’s the source of truth.
I wrote the longer version up here: How to make an AI-built website not look AI generated
A few other things that came up:
- Last week’s outreach homework is working. Now what? (Keep going. More, better, new: do more before you do better, before you do new. I got that from Alex Hormozi.)
- Should you rule out a whole industry because one client was bad? (No. Bad clients are in every industry. Look at your positioning and who it’s attracting.)
- Should you use a separate domain for cold outreach? (Only if cold email is an actual strategy. Then yes, so it doesn’t drag down the sender reputation of your main domain.)
- How do you turn one-off website builds into recurring work? (Put them on a small retainer for changes, then pitch something bigger once they trust you.)
- Is it okay to connect Claude to your email and calendar? (With strict rules on what it can and can’t do, it’s been really helpful for me. Not if you’re handling patient records.)
This is what the Friday calls are. Practical, collaborative, no bells and whistles.
If you can’t make it, every session gets recorded and added to a private library that’s chapter-marked and summarized, so you can find the bit that matches whatever you’re stuck on.
Talk soon,
Brad