A couple of years ago, I built a website to showcase a set of letters my family has had for a very long time. They were written during the Civil War by two brothers, James D. Wade and William H. Wade, who served together in the Union Army. William is my great-great-grandfather. I have the physical letters, and my dad, Webb Wade, had them transcribed back in 2007 so people could actually read them without a magnifying glass and a lot of guessing.
The site did its job. Every letter was there, transcribed in full, with scans of the originals next to it. But it was bland. I used a stock Hugo template (Hugo is a static site generator), dropped the content in, and left it alone. I have zero design skills. Not “a little,” zero. So “it works and the content is there” was about as far as I was ever going to take it.
Today I spent about an hour with Claude Code and a skill called Impeccable and redesigned the entire site.
If you haven’t run into it, Impeccable is an open source design skill for Claude Code (it works with Cursor and a few other tools too). It started from Anthropic’s own frontend-design skill and builds on it. The short version is that it gives the model an actual design vocabulary, typography, color, spacing, how things should behave on a phone, along with a list of things not to do, so you don’t end up with the same generic look every AI tool produces when you leave it to its own devices. You install it as a plugin and then it just changes how Claude approaches the front end.
I pointed it at the site, told it what the letters were and who they were for, and let it work. An hour later the site actually looks like a place you’d want to sit down and read 160-year-old letters. The home page leads with a portrait of James and the first page of Willie’s first letter. The letters are grouped by year. There is a chronology that puts the letters alongside what was happening in the war, biographies of the brothers, and a search box. None of that content is new. It was all there before. It just wasn’t presented in a way that made you want to read it.
I won’t pretend I understand every decision it made. I know the site looks right, it reads right, and the letters are finally presented the way they deserve to be.
Could a bona fide designer do better? Probably. But I was never going to hire a designer for a family history site, so the realistic alternative wasn’t “better,” it was “stock template forever.” For someone like me, this is an absolute game changer.
Go take a look. Start with the first letter, Willie writing home to his parents from Fort McHenry in July of 1862.