Case study
Sophie's Music
My own music site, at last. A still highland night, both records playing in full, and nothing asked of you in return.
Modern classical piano · artist site · 2026 · Custom-coded site with a streaming player, built with Claude Design on Cloudflare · Claude Design · Cloudflare Pages · hand-coded
Live site: sophiesmusic.com
Why I finally built it
I have written music for years without a place of my own to put it. A proper site always looked too dear and too slow to make, so the records lived on streaming platforms that look the same for everyone and keep the listener for themselves. Building it by hand with Claude, hosted on Cloudflare, changed that. The music has a home I own outright now, and it looks like the music rather than like a template.
It is modern classical piano, played by ear, drawn from the highland landscape I grew up in. What I set myself was a feeling more than a list of pages: quiet, unhurried, the place the records came from. Somewhere that holds you for a moment before you decide where to go next.
What I built
The homepage is a highland night. Layered hills fade into mist under a full moon. An aurora drifts across the sky, and a low pine forest runs along the horizon. None of it is film or a stock photo. The hills are hand-drawn across six depth layers, and the forest is grown fresh on every visit, so no two loads are quite alike. That suited music improvised at the piano, found by ear rather than set on the page.
Move the cursor and the ridges shift at different speeds, which gives the scene real depth. The nearest one breathes, a slow rise and fall that quickens while a track is playing. Scattered along the treeline are small glowing lights you can click. They lift off, scatter a little colour, and settle back a few minutes later. Nobody asked for those. They came out of tinkering late one evening and stayed, because they reward a bit of curiosity without ever asking for your attention.
Both records play in full, on the page. I built the player from scratch: a docked bar at the foot of the screen, a seek you can drag, track lists with real durations, previous and next that keep you inside the one album, and a memory of where you stopped so you come back mid-phrase. The Listen button drops you straight into Remembering. The records are on Bandcamp if you want to take one home, but you never have to leave to hear them.
Played by ear, the pieces are never the same twice. The night they sit in isn't either.
What I left out
For everything that went in, ten things stayed out. No autoplay, no cookie wall. Nothing leaps up for your email the moment you arrive. The only form on the site is a quiet sign-up for the third record, Infra Aura, and nothing about you is tracked or kept. Two typefaces carry the lot, a light serif for the lyrical moments and a plain grotesque for the working parts, and the colours come straight off a night sky: deep navy, a teal borrowed from the aurora, one soft green.
The part you don't see is where the time really went. Every animation stops for a visitor whose browser asks for less motion. The heavier effects ease back or switch off on a phone, so it stays smooth in one hand. The structured data spells out who I am and which records are mine, so a link shared anywhere arrives looking intended.
The full homepage
The part the tool can't do
Claude let me build this in a fraction of the time it would have taken alone. What that speed hides is the choosing. A tool will hand you a hero animation in seconds, but not the judgement of which one belongs to this music and which ninety-nine to throw away. Same with knowing when to stop. The hard work wasn't adding the aurora and the motes and the lights, it was turning them down until they felt like part of the place instead of decoration, and resisting nearly everything else.
What it cost
I bought the domain years ago and never did a thing with it. The site that finally sits on it took a weekend. Every penny the records make goes to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, said plainly in the hero, the player and the footer, with no speech around it. After all this time, the music has somewhere to live that is mine.