How to build a local history website for your village in 30 minutes

3 min readLocal history

Building a website for your village used to mean either finding a programmer (expensive, complicated, and who do you even ask?) or learning web design yourself. With AI, anyone can do it.

Today I built a site like this for my own village. Here’s how to do the same.

Illustration: a computer screen with the Lyuga-Kaksi village website, a robot with a cup of tea, and the steps from a project folder to a published site

Why have a website at all?

When you research your family, you inevitably become the leading expert on your ancestral village. Material piles up: document scans, spreadsheets, archive extracts. It all sits in folders on your computer.

The problem: a folder is a closed box. Nobody can find you.

A website, on the other hand, gets indexed by search engines. Someone googles “Lyuga-Kaksi village” or “Averin surname Vyatka” and finds you. They write to you. They turn out to be a distant relative. They fill in the story with photos you never knew existed.

A website is a magnet. You don’t have to hunt for relatives; they find you.

What you’ll need

  1. Claude Code or Cursor (requires a subscription)
  2. The frontend-design skill: optional, but it makes the result better
  3. Your village data in a structured form, for example a timeline of the village’s history with sources. I like the “village life timeline” by the Russian genealogist Elena Brozovskaya
  4. Half an hour

How to do it

  1. Create a project folder
  2. Launch Claude Code or Cursor in it
  3. Paste in this prompt. It’s written in Russian, so if you want to read or tweak it first, ask the AI to translate it for you
  4. Answer the AI’s questions
  5. Get a ready-made HTML file with your site

How to publish it

Free static hosting is plenty for a site like this. Here’s one free way, with GitHub Pages (GitHub’s guide):

  1. Sign up at GitHub and create a new public repository
  2. Upload your HTML file, named index.html, plus any images or other files that came with it (Add file → Upload files)
  3. Open Settings → Pages, choose “Deploy from a branch,” pick the main branch and save
  4. In a minute or two, your site is live at username.github.io/repository-name

If you’d rather skip the repository, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages let you publish by dragging your site folder into the browser.

Here’s what I got: Lyuga-Kaksi: the history of a village on two riverbanks (1716–1989) (in Russian).

If you’ve already put together a spreadsheet of the soldiers from your village with my earlier recipe, you can turn it into a separate searchable section of the site.

Give it a try and show me what you get!

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