How I use Claude for web development: a designer's guide to building from scratch

I am not a developer. I have never been one. For over ten years I designed interfaces for banks and fintech companies. I knew what a div was. I could inspect an element in Chrome. I had opinions about padding. But writing a full application from scratch was never something I imagined doing. Then I started using Claude. And in about two months, working evenings and weekends, I built a complete trilingual blog with PHP, MySQL, a custom admin panel, scheduled posts, a generative image system, and SEO that Google actually indexes. No WordPress. No frameworks. No templates. This is not a tutorial about Claude Code or vibe coding. This is about what happens when a designer with real industry experience uses Claude as a development partner to build something production-ready. The mistakes, the breakthroughs, and what I learned about both coding and communicating with AI. Claude vs ChatGPT for coding: what I found after months of use I tried both. Extensively. Here is what I found after months