Get your files out and organized

You’ve built a site you’re happy with in the last guide. Right now it lives inside Claude. To put it on the internet, you first need it as a real file on your own computer — a master copy you own and control. This guide gets it out and gets it organized, so the next two steps (GitHub and Netlify) go quickly. It’s short and mechanical: no decisions, just a few clicks.

How do I download my website from Claude?

In the artifact preview panel, look for the download icon — a downward-pointing arrow. It may sit in a corner of the panel or under a small menu (•••). Click it, and Claude saves your site as an .html file to your computer’s Downloads folder.

That single file is a complete, self-contained copy of your website — double-click it and it opens in any browser, exactly like the preview did, even with no internet connection. One thing to make sure of: your site should be a plain web page (it is, if you followed the brief and asked for “one clean page”). That’s what downloads as a ready-to-use file.

If you don’t see a download button — it’s tucked away on some screens — just ask Claude directly:

Claude will paste the full page into the chat as a block of code. Copy all of it, paste it into a plain text editor (Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac), and save it with a name ending in .html. Same result, by a slightly longer road.

What file did I just get, and what is it?

One file: an HTML file. That single file is your entire website — all your pages, words, layout, and styling, bundled together in one place.

You don’t need to understand what’s inside it. It’s the same thing you’ve been shaping in plain English this whole time; opening it just shows it in your browser. Your only job from here is to keep it safe and named correctly. (If Claude happened to hand you more than one file, that’s fine too — just keep them all together, which the next section covers.)

How should I name and organize the file?

Rename the file to index.html, then put it in a single folder named for your business. That folder becomes your website’s master copy.

• Rename it index.html. This exact name matters: web hosts automatically treat index.html as the front page of a site. Your downloaded file probably has a long automatic name — change it to index.html (all lowercase).
• Make one folder, named something like my-bakery-website, and put index.html inside it. From now on, this folder is the one thing you back up and the one thing you publish.
• If you have separate photo files, make an images folder inside it and keep them there, then ask Claude to confirm your page points to them correctly. If your photos are already built into the HTML, there’s nothing extra to do.

So your folder is simply this:

my-bakery-website/
   index.html      (your whole website)
   images/         (your photos, only if you have separate image files)

That’s the entire “file structure.” For most first sites, it really is just one file in one folder.

Why bother with this step?

Because the next two guides — putting your site on GitHub, then publishing it with Netlify — both work directly with this folder. Getting it clean now makes them quick instead of confusing.

This little folder is what you’ll upload to GitHub (your free, safe online backup with a built-in history), and then hand to Netlify (which turns it into a live website at your own address). Everything downstream points back to this one tidy folder. It’s also your insurance: even if you never opened Claude again, you’d still fully own your complete website — right here, on your own computer.

Your website is now a real file you own, named correctly and tucked into its folder. Next, we give it a safe home online and a version history — using GitHub, explained with zero jargon. That’s GitHub for normal people, the next guide in this series.