Anna Laurila

About this website

The art of coding a website without a clue

I wanted a place of my own where I could bring together everything I do — images, film, music, writing, books and design.

After trying WordPress, Squarespace and a few other options, I decided to try coding it myself with ChatGPT. Hiring a web agency wasn’t really within my budget.

I also wanted to find out how far I could get from scratch. No coding knowledge. No templates. No WordPress. No clue.

Code is really just instructions telling a browser what goes where and what should happen when someone clicks something. I couldn’t write those instructions, but I could explain what I wanted. ChatGPT wrote the code; I put it in, tested it, made changes and asked for the next thing.

One of the angels who used to live on my old homepage.

And we kept at it. It worked. An actual website emerged. But ChatGPT wasn’t always the world’s most reliable programmer. Images would suddenly move, one change could break something else, and sometimes it was hard to understand what had happened. Especially for me, because I still couldn’t code. When something went wrong, I couldn’t just open the file and fix it myself. I depended on ChatGPT both finding the problem and managing to solve it.

After two versions, I put the half-finished site on hold and decided to think about something else for a while. It stayed that way for quite some time.

Then, in 2026, I started using Codex. With ChatGPT, it had been a bit like having a programmer on the phone: I described what I wanted, got code back and tried to put it in the right place myself. With Codex, I could get help directly in the website project, where the files were. It became easier to make changes and check the results together.

I hesitated for a long time before daring to let Codex into the house. But eventually I did, and so far I haven’t regretted it for a second.

That was when the site started moving again. Codex has built on what was there, cleared out old leftovers, improved the mobile version and helped me turn the whole thing into a website that actually works. It has also helped with search engine optimisation — making it easier for Google to understand what the pages are about and what’s here. The site now has a sitemap and is connected to Google Search Console, where I can see whether Google is finding the pages and, over time, how people find their way here.

The funny thing is that the website was originally just meant to be the place where I collected things I’d made. The images, films, music, writing, books and design.

Now the website itself is one of the things I’ve made.

Credits

Anna Laurila
Ideas, content, writing, images, film, music, design, decisions and sheer persistence.
ChatGPT
Helped me build the first versions by writing code from my instructions, and has also helped with writing and ideas.
Codex
Helps me build, change, repair, tidy up and check the website project.

Midjourney has been used in some of my image work, and Suno to create music. Netlify publishes the website, and Namecheap manages the domain annalaurila.com. With Google Search Console I can follow how Google finds and indexes the site.