I want to be clear about something before I say anything else. I have no coding background. None. I am an office manager and executive assistant by trade, and a content creator by choice. The most technical thing I did for years was fix the printer.

So when I tell you that joyhdae.com is now hosted on Netlify and managed through GitHub, I need you to hear it the way I’d hear it: with suspicion, and a little bit of “okay, but what does that actually mean.”

Here is what it actually means.

What these two things are

GitHub is where my website’s files live. Think of it like a Google Doc with a very detailed version history. Every change I make gets saved with a short note about what changed, and nothing is ever really lost. If I break something, I can look back and see exactly where it happened.

Netlify is what puts the website on the internet. It watches my GitHub folder, and when something new lands there, it publishes it. That’s it. It’s the part that takes my files and turns them into joyhdae.com.

Together, they work like this: I change something, GitHub saves it, and Netlify publishes it. Automatically.

How I used to do it

Before this, I was updating my site by hand. Drag, drop, upload, hope. It worked, but it felt fragile. Every update was a small act of faith, and I had no record of what I’d changed or when.

Now my site lives in a GitHub repository, and Netlify deploys it every time I make a change to the main branch. No more drag and drop. Everything goes through GitHub, and that one habit has made the whole thing feel less scary, because there is exactly one front door.

What it’s teaching me

I didn’t sign up to learn how websites work. I signed up to have a website. But using these two tools every week has been a slow, low-pressure education.

A few things I’ve picked up just by doing:

  • A website is just files. Pages, images, text. That’s all it is. Once I understood that, it stopped feeling like magic and started feeling like organizing, which I am very good at.
  • Small changes are safe changes. Because GitHub tracks everything, I’m not afraid to try things. Undoing is built in.
  • You can verify your own site. I confirmed my site with Google Search Console by adding one small file to my repository. A year ago I wouldn’t have known what that sentence meant.
  • The blog lives in the same place. My blog posts are part of the site now, so writing one and publishing one are the same motion.

The first time it worked

One of my first edits wasn’t a fix. It was a creative swing. I wanted the site to feel more dynamic and show more of my brand identity, so I came up with the concept, made the change, and hit commit.

Then I watched it come to life.

No upload. No refresh-and-pray. I made a decision on my screen, and a few moments later it was just there, live on my own website.

I celebrated. Quietly. Alone, at my desk, with the energy of someone who just got away with something.

Here’s why that moment mattered: it wasn’t about the code. It was the first time the distance between “I have an idea for my site” and “my site now does that” felt short. That gap used to feel like it belonged to other people, the ones who “do tech.” It turns out the gap is a lot smaller than I was told.

What it costs

I’ll be straight about this because it matters. Netlify’s hosting tier I’m using is free. My domain is not. The domain is a separate purchase, so if you’re budgeting, plan for that.

Where Claude fits in

I’m not doing this alone. Claude fits in as a partner. It helps me learn about the tools I’m interested in using and tells me how to use them. It audits my sites and helps me with my SEO optimization. It’s truly like having a team. The point isn’t that a tool did it for me. The point is that I understand what’s happening to my own website, and I can keep going without waiting on anyone.

Why this matters to me

A lot of women, and a lot of Black women specifically, hear “tech” and quietly decide it isn’t for us. Nobody says it out loud. It just becomes the room we don’t walk into.

I’m walking in, and I’m not pretending to be an expert. I’m showing you the receipts: a real site, a real process, a person with no coding background keeping it running.

Having a presence online used to feel like something I had to hire out or be lucky enough to figure out. Now it’s a system I understand and a place on the internet that is actually mine.

Still learning. Obviously.

Joyhdae