How to make a site like this

Joe Weisman liked to build things himself. He also didn't like websites with advertising and lots of social media links. He liked clean and simple design.

To honor this, we decided to build him a memorial site from scratch. But to also honor his desire to make things that improved the world more generally, we thought it would be good to make all the code and content public, so others could use our work to make their own sites. So if you're facing the same task for someone you've lost, please copy this whole project and make it yours.

This is easier than it sounds! This site was built by two people over a week or so, with the help of Claude Code (an AI coding assistant). We did not hire anyone or already know how to code websites like this. Now that all this code is written, you can set up a site just like it, and then change all the content to be about someone else. That should take even less time than we spent to build it the first time!

We designed the site to be something not too expensive. Running the site should cost about $5 a month to run, plus the cost of a domain name (usually $10–20 a year). We built it to still be standing in ten years with nobody tending it.

Finally, if you are using this to make a site for a loved one, then we imagine you are going through a hard time right now. We have found that making a site to celebrate our father, and all that he inspired us to do (including making this site) was immensly comforting. We hope your process of celebrating your loved one by making something to show who they were is similarly satisfying. We would love if you kept something like this message on your site to get the word out to even more people about this resource.

Sincerely,

Jazz and Luke

The steps to setting up a site

To get started, please follow these steps:

  1. Install Claude Code on your computer. This should take only a few minutes to set up if you've never used it. Once you have Claude Code open, you can, if you need help with the steps below, ask it to help you by simply saying "please help me with this" and then pasting this document into Claude Code.
  2. Make a free GitHub account on https://github.com/.
  3. Go to github.com/jazzlw/joeweisman and click Fork near the top right — that makes your own copy of the whole project, under your own GitHub account. Your site will have its own GitHub url, something like github.com/<your username>/<your project name>. At this point anything you change will change for your site, not ours.
  4. So far, once you fork, the site is not on your computer yet, it is just on GitHub. To get it to your computer to work on it, clone your fork (not the original site) to your computer (GitHub's green Code button gives you the command to copy and paste), and then open that folder in Claude Code. One way to do this is to open Claude Code and give it the URL to your site and say, "please clone this so we can work on it."
  5. Next, run Claude in the downloaded folder and tell Claude: "Read FORKING.md and walk me through setting this up." It will guide you through personalizing the content and getting your own copy online, one step at a time.
  6. For editing the content, we recommend using a "Markdown Editor" such as Typora. Once you have the site downloaded to your computer, you can open up the content/ folder and just start editing files! Again, ask Claude if you are having trouble. You can say things such as, "I don't want the recipe section, please remove it," or "I added several files about my loved one, please help me wire them up to my website."

If you want technical information about the site, look through the .md files such as FORKING.md and README.md. If you want to understand why the site was built the way it was (e.g., why we used one web service and not another, and so forth), historic/HISTORY.md explains the reasoning behind every major decision.

You can also go to the GitHub website for our project (https://github.com/jazzlw/joeweisman) and submit "Issues" (look for a button at top) if something is not working right. We would be very interested to see what you are doing, and how we can make this project even more accessible.