I handed Claude my website to-do list

Photo by Naeem Haque, WordPress Photo Directory (CC0).

I’ve kept a big running list of updates I wanted to make to this webiste for years. Mismatched colours, pages formatted in different ways, citations that drifted from one style to another. I had a clear vision for how I wanted the site to look and work, but the scale of the list kept me avoiding it. My plan was to outline everything and painstakingly tackle the changes one at a time, whenever I found the time.

Then, while researching AI agents and automation, I decided to try something different. I connected Claude to my site to see if it could help me execute my vision. This post covers what we did, what worked, and where I’d still keep a hand on the wheel.

What I actually did

Claude connects to WordPress.com through a connector, so it can read and edit my pages, templates, menus, and styles directly. I didn’t copy and paste anything back and forth. I described what I wanted, and it made the changes on the live site and checked them in a browser.

In one session we:

• Applied my red brand colour across the whole site, then added a teal hover state for buttons.
• Checked that all colours, buttons, backgrounds, and boxes were consistent across the whole site.
• Checked the tags and categories on every post to make them consistent and remove redundancies.
• Made the footer copyright year update itself, so I don’t have to edit it each January.
• Restyled the mobile menu so it’s no longer a plain list of tiny links. Now it’s much more readable and had proper hover states.
• Replaced the existing Windows 98 style icons used on pages throughout the site with Google Materials icons. Now they all have a consistent colour.
• Rebuilt my home page with a clearer title, four buttons with short descriptions, and a visual hierarchy.
• Redesigned the blog page, including a better spot for the blog logo.

That’s a lot of small jobs. Normally each one would mean digging through theme settings or CSS and then forgetting what I changed.

Colour and brand choices

My compass logo has always been a burnt rust red, so that became the anchor for the whole palette. We used it (#A14725) for headings and the main home page button. Against a white background it has a contrast ratio of about 6:1, which clears the 4.5:1 minimum the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) set for body text.

For contrast, we picked a deep teal (#2B5550) for links and button hover states. Teal sits across the colour wheel from rust, so it reads as a clear change without clashing, and it reaches about 8:1 against white. Charcoal (#2B2B2B) handles the buttons and the dark header. A lighter rust tint (#E08A66) shows up on navigation hover, because the darker rust would be hard to read against the charcoal.

The fonts follow the same idea: Montserrat for headings and Inter for body text. I only had to describe the palette once. Then, Claude applied it as site-wide styles instead of colouring things page by page, which is why everything stayed consistent.

Finding mistakes I didn’t know I had

This part saved me the most time. I asked Claude to check every citation on my Publications and Presentations pages against Chicago style. That’s tedious work that people (me included) skip.

It caught inconsistent formatting, but it also caught problems of substance. Some links were swapped or pointing to the wrong pages entirely. A co-author’s name had a typo. Some of those I’d never have spotted on my own, because I’d read those pages a hundred times.

The pattern was useful. I didn’t ask, “Is my site good?” I asked it to check a specific standard across every entry. AI is good at that kind of narrow, repetitive review.

I didn’t love the header images I used for my Publications and Presentations page. I told Claude that the images weren’t necessary and to replace them with “something more functional to help users read the content.” Claude decided on buttons that that link to different sections of the page. Perfect. Create stop links inside pages is tedious, so this saved me tonnes of time.

Enforcing standards

I also learned that if you tell Claude your rules once, it applies them everywhere. I wanted URLs at the end of each citation, titles bold but unlinked, and one consistent look for every section heading. It applied those rules to dozens of entries across two pages without drifting.

This is super valuable. A rule I’d normally forget by entry number 20 stayed consistent through entry 60.

Broad changes, without the headache

Changing the site’s main colour used to feel risky. What else would it touch? With Claude I could say what I wanted, have it make the change in one place, and then look at the result on desktop and phone-sized screens before moving on.

The same applied to the home page. I asked what it thought of the design, picked the changes I agreed with, and watched it make them. Some changes took a few tries, which brings me to the next section.

Where Claude fell short

Here’s a list of places where Claude didn’t do so great.

• It made things up. When I asked it to add a book chapter citation, it guessed at the author details and got them wrong. I had to correct it. It also flagged a few things it wasn’t sure about, which I appreciated, but I still had to be the one who knew the answer.
• It needed checking. Some of its first attempts at layout didn’t work. The home page buttons stacked in one column when I wanted a grid, and it took a few rounds to fix. Looking at the real result mattered more than trusting a confident description.
• It hit limits. It couldn’t upload one of my photos because its workspace couldn’t reach the upload service. A human still has to be in the loop for some things.

For a small site like this, anyone could do this by hand over a weekend or two. But what’s changed for me is that the tedious, boring work got done instead of staying on a list.

What I’d tell you if you try this

1. Give it specific checks, not vague goals. “Audit every citation against Chicago style” gets better results than “make my site better.”
2. State your rules up front. It will apply them everywhere.
3. Verify facts yourself. Names, dates, and links are your responsibility.
4. Look at the result. Open the page on your phone and desktop before you call it done.

My Takeaway: I like to do my own writing, so Claude now functions like a patient assistant who doesn’t mind helping me with the less glamorous work. Perhaps now I can spend more time creating content rather than formatting it.