How we launched the new Kowalah website in seven days

Today we launched the new Kowalah website with refined positioning, a new style, and a focus on buyer enablement content to help CIOs leading their enterprise AI roll-out.

Fifteen years ago I remember being part of a website project that took more than six months.

We did this in seven days and here's how.

Day 1: Positioning

I had already been noodling on my dog walks that our positioning was weak.

We did some training, some coaching, we built some agents, we did a bit of evangelism. We had some large customers, some small customers. We worked with some CIOs, some CEOs, some COOs.

We needed to tighten it up so that our best fit customers knew exactly which 'shelf' to find us on.

Our marketing agent, Krista, has been enabled with a Positioning skill we built based off April Dunford's excellent book "Obviously Awesome".

Krista led us though a positioning workshop following April's framework giving us a refined positioning canvas including:

• Competitive alternatives
• Distinct capabilities
• Differentiated value themes

(April also has a follow-on book "Sales Pitch" for which we have another skill we used to take that positioning and evolve it into a first call deck)

Day 2: Learning design

On Day 3 we're doing to get into Claude Design, but before we do - you are already seeing 1000s of website, decks, proposals, and ad copy that 'smells' like Claude.

Sepia paper background, serif fonts, and light purple call outs immediately sing "Claude"

To avoid this ,day two was researching - using Claude to help find well respected designers describing styles, using Wikipedia to learn about those styles, reviewing sites of companies that implemented those styles.

We found this article to be very helpful in understanding popular aesthetics.

Having our positioning in hand helped us hone in on one or two styles that reflected Kowalah and would resonate with our target buyer.

Swiss Style, grounded in International Typographic was our decision - a style where words do the talking, clean grids structure the page, and images only surface when they teach the reader something new.

I have no doubt a professional designer would have given us more depth, challenged this thinking and taken us in a different direction - yet this took a couple of hours and zero cost.

Day 3: Design System

With positioning and design style in hand we were then able to head to Claude Design.

Released only a couple of months ago, it allows you to create designs, and better than that, create 'design systems' that can be used to create designs.

We opened up a new project to create a design system, and fed it our positioning, our current website code, our brand colours, our logo, our Kowalah Way methodology, and our recommendations for our Swiss style direction.

We asked Claude Design to research all the context provided, then walk us through a design workshop to build out the tokens and core components to build a new design system.

At the end of this process we had style templates for all the core page types on the website, plus a pitch deck for use in Google Slides/Canva.

Day 4: Refresh the website design

Our website is built using the Astro framework, coded via Claude Code in a Ghostty terminal.

What we love about this is Astro has an MCP and Claude knows exactly how to build and use it.

Combined with Wispr Flow we just 'talk' our website pages into life.

We grab this prompt from Claude Design and feed it into Claude Code in the website project.

This then unpacks the design system, copying it into the project - even installing a new "kowalah-design" skill that teaches Claude how to implement it.

We then ask Claude to review the new design system and make the foundational changes to the tokens and components.

Within just this first pass the look and feel changed - even before a page by page review,

Day 5: Site architecture rebuild

Now I want to introduce you to something that I cannot believe is free - Corey Haines' marketing skills plugin

His github repo contains over 30 skills designed for marketers - many of which are focused on web design and copy, you just install the full plugin via Claude Code.

To start with you run the product-marketing-context skill, which we provided our positioning, sales pitch, Kowalah Way methodology, deliverables, Playing To Win Strategy, and Jobs To Be Done frameworks for our key personas.

This skill then writes this up in a way to be consumed by other skills.

Next we started with the site-architecture skill - given our repositioning and new design system we wanted to take a completely fresh look at the top level navigation, naming and sub directories of the website which this guided us through.

Products became platform, Vendors became technology, and a total restructure of how our buyer enablement content was found.

Day 6: Page by page copy rewrite

Now the site looks good and is structured correctly - and we needed to re-write the copy on every page, or create new copy for new pages.

Leaning on Corey's skills again, we used a combo of copywriting,copy-edit pulling in the knowledge from the product marketing context to ensure the copy was ours, and didn't also 'smell' like Claude.

Rather than asking Claude to just write the content, we asked Claude to use the skills to review the current page, make recommendations to us, and then interview us about additional context, insights or references we wanted to add.

A quick note on images and videos.

Swiss style is by nature not image heavy - no stock photos here.

However they can be used when they teach the reader something they couldn't get via words, we chose two scenarios:

• A Kowalah deliverable - such as a Vision Map, or a AI roadmap
• Kowalah products in action - such as the Kowalah agent running in Microsoft Teams

We asked Claude to draft an approach and skill for these (using Remotion for videos) so they are all consistent across the website.

(Remotion has its own skills to teach Claude how to create Remotion videos!)

Day 7: SEO, AEO and web best practices

Now the site looks and reads how we want it to, and the final step before the switch over was to help others find it and consume it.

Again leaning on Corey's marketing skills we ran in order:

seo-audit- as it sounds, a top to bottom review of the site from an SEO discoverability perspective

ai-seo- you may call this aeo or geo - it relates to helping your site get found and referenced by LLMs

We then ran a couple of other skills: web-design-guidelines from Vercel to look for any common gotchas

And another pass using the Astro MCP to check we hadn't introduced any non-standard techniques.

By this point we were happy to launch v1 of the new site, which was deployed yesterday.

The path forward

In 2010 a website project was very much that - a project. A big lift to get the new site live, and then bar some additional content and the occasional new page the site was static.

With the combination of Claude Code, Claude Design, Astro, and Corey and others' skills we see the site as extremely fluid.

It gives us a platform to build new structures, new templates and guides and new ways of supporting our buyers in the very earliest stages of their AI journey.

The new design system has also been implemented across the Kowalah platform, and our sales and delivery decks, ensuring we have a consistent look and feel across our customer facing surfaces.

We are excited to see what comes next.