A friend who runs an auto detailing business needed a website. He'd been meaning to set one up for years but never got around to it. I said I'd take care of it.
A few weeks earlier, I would have had no idea where to start. After two weeks of building with Brandy, the answer was obvious.
The Design
I asked Brandy to design a premium-looking auto detailing website. She built a full HTML/CSS single-page site — dark theme, clean typography, service listings, contact section, a clear call to action. The kind of site that looks like it cost money to build.
The hours section originally read "Mon–Sat: 11:30 AM – 7:30 PM." My friend wanted it changed to "By appointment only." One message to Brandy, one edit, done.
The Deployment
We used the same Cloudflare Pages direct upload flow that had worked for alfredandsabrina.com: collect all files, get a JWT token from the Cloudflare API, check which files are already cached, upload only the new ones, create a deployment with a manifest. The whole process runs as a single Node.js script.
One command. Site is live at autoheaquarter.pages.dev. Add a custom domain, update DNS, done.
Custom Domain + DNS
By this point I'd already been through the DNS migration learning curve. Adding autoheadquarter.com as a custom domain was straightforward — add the domain to the CF Pages project, add the CNAME record in Cloudflare DNS, wait for verification. The main thing I knew to avoid: don't try to add the custom domain before the DNS records exist. Get the CNAME in place first, then add the domain in Pages.
Both autoheadquarter.com and www.autoheadquarter.com now work with HTTPS and serve the site from Cloudflare's edge. No hosting bill. No server to manage. The business owner just needs to keep the domain registered ($10/yr) and the site stays up indefinitely.
The Real Point
Three weeks earlier, "deploy a website with a custom domain" felt like a thing that required either a web developer or a website builder service (Wix, Squarespace, etc.) with a recurring subscription.
It doesn't. A capable AI plus a modern static hosting platform plus a domain name is the whole stack. The AI handles the design and the deployment logic. The platform (Cloudflare Pages) is free. The domain is ten dollars a year.
I'm not saying this makes professional web developers obsolete. Complex sites with databases, user authentication, e-commerce — those still need real engineering. But for a simple business presence? The tooling has gotten genuinely democratized.