I’ve been building WordPress and WooCommerce sites by hand for close to fifteen years. Every theme, every plugin, every line of custom PHP, typed myself, tested myself, deployed myself.
But when it came time to put a homepage on cartrules.com, I decided to try something different. Especially after a whole summer spent “playing” with AI…
Instead of opening a code editor, I switched on Novamira Pro, connected Claude Code directly to the site, and let it build the website with a few prompts. I think it worked pretty well!
The domain, and switching Novamira on
Registering cartrules.com was the easy part, eleven dollars and change for the year.
The interesting step came right after: installing Novamira Pro on a staging environment at staging2.cartrules.com.
Novamira strongly advises working on staging only, so that’s what I did. Here’s the screenshot upon licence activation:
Novamira sits in the WordPress admin like any other plugin, but its whole reason for existing is different. It’s built to let an AI client act on your site directly, not just suggest code for you to paste in.
What “AI abilities” actually means
Novamira’s configuration screen makes the stakes clear from the start. There’s a checkbox labeled “Turn on AI Abilities for this site”, and right below it a security note in red: when enabled, AI agents can execute PHP code and perform filesystem operations on the site.
It tells you plainly that this is for development and staging environments, to always keep backups, and to set your client to ask for confirmation before every action.
Connecting Claude Code to the site
The same screen offered a choice of authentication method, OAuth or an application password, and a list of AI clients Novamira already knows how to talk to: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, GitHub Copilot, and a dozen others.
I picked Claude Code from that list and ran the command Novamira gave me:
claude mcp add novamira-staging2-cartrul --transport http https://staging2.cartrules.com/wp-json/mcp/novamira-oauth
A quick OAuth sign-in in the browser, and that was it. Claude Code was now talking directly to my WordPress site through Novamira’s MCP server, not just reading files on my laptop.
That moment is the whole story of this post. For the first time, I wasn’t copying code between a chat window and my editor. I described what I wanted, and the AI built it on the actual site.
Watching the homepage build itself
The first prompt asked for a homepage that explained what Cart Rules does: small WooCommerce plugins that stop the wrong products, quantities, and categories from reaching checkout.
The first pass back was plain, just the basic theme header and the headline sitting on a bare page, no styling to speak of.
A couple more prompts later, it had turned into a real homepage. A dark hero section with “Control exactly what goes in the cart” as the headline, a short line explaining the idea, a “See the plugins” button, and a panel showing example rules like “Max qty: 1” and “One category per order”.
Below that, a “Why Cart Rules exists” section explaining the actual problem, a “Pick your plugin” section with pricing cards, and a “How it works” list in three plain steps:
It read like something I’d have written myself, just faster, and while I was doing other things.
The parts that still needed me
A few prompts got me most of the way there, not all the way. The plugin cards still carried generic placeholder icons instead of real product images, and the button blue wasn’t the actual CartRules brand color.
I came back to Claude Code and asked to swap in the real logo and images and fix the accent colors to match the brand I’d already built out.
While Novamira worked through that revision, it opened a “Block Editor Queue” browser tab of its own, using the real Gutenberg editor in the background to validate and save the block changes safely, and asked me to leave that tab open until the session finished.
None of that took long, and none of it changed how I feel about the process. Getting a homepage from nothing to nearly done in a few minutes, then spending a bit more time on brand details I care about, still beats writing every section by hand from a blank page!
The final result
What’s live on cartrules.com today has moved on from the screenshots above. The headline now reads “Take control of your WooCommerce cart” instead of the first version, the plugin cards show the real products instead of placeholder icons, and there’s a proper “Why CartRules exists” section with my own photo and story.
Some of that came from more prompts, some I wrote and placed myself.
That’s the part a screenshot from one afternoon can’t capture: a homepage isn’t finished when the first version looks good, it’s finished when you’ve looked at it for a few weeks and kept fixing the small things.
Novamira got me a working page in minutes. Getting from there to what’s live now still took the usual rounds of “actually, let’s change this too”.
The honest verdict
I’m not going to pretend an AI built cartrules.com on its own. I picked the platform, wrote the prompts, reviewed every change before it went live, and finished the branding myself.
What changed is where most of the time went. Instead of hours on markup and layout, I spent that time on the words and the details that actually needed my judgment.
There’s something fitting about building CartRules this way. The plugin itself is about giving store owners control over exactly what goes in the cart.
Working with Novamira on staging, reviewing each change before trusting it, is the same idea applied to my own site: control over what an AI is allowed to touch, and a clear line for when I step back in.
