Side Project — James Website
Rebuilt from a Notion page into a hand-coded site
jamespraise.xyz used to redirect to a Notion page through a Cloudflare Worker. I rebuilt it in code, the same way I rebuilt Marketing In Action's.
What It Is
jamespraise.xyz is my own site, this one. Hand coded in HTML, CSS, and plain JavaScript, the same way I rebuilt Marketing In Action's site. It replaced a Notion page that had been standing in as my site for years, redirected through a Cloudflare Worker.
Why I Built It
Notion let me ship a site without knowing how to code, which made sense back when I couldn't build one myself. Now that I run Claude Code every day, Notion's design ceiling became the actual problem, especially next to other operators in my own market who all have hand-coded sites of their own.
Before I touched a line of code, I did a proper teardown of a few peers in my own market. Each one does something a page builder can't: live animations, custom illustrated components, an AI chat widget answering questions for visitors, case studies with specific numbers attached. That teardown is what made rebuilding non-negotiable, not just a nice-to-have.
What It Does
The site runs my whole portfolio: home, work (client case studies, self-built side projects, and one-off pitch pages), about, speaking, and writing. Every client case study lives natively on the site now instead of linking out to a Notion database, the same fix I made for MIA's own case studies first. Every page shares one design system, built and refined the same way I refine anything else I ship.
What It Taught Me
Rebuilding my own site was the clearest proof yet that the skill I built doing this for MIA actually transfers. I didn't take a course or hire anyone. I ran the same process twice: research the competitors first, build in code with Claude Code, then keep shipping in small changes instead of one big rewrite.
It also taught me the actual limit of a tool like Notion. It's not speed, Notion was genuinely faster to start with. It's the ceiling on how far you can push design and interactivity before the tool itself is what's holding you back.
Want something like this?
I'm open to full-time or in-house work where you need an ongoing plan or someone to lead marketing for the long term. I also offer specific marketing and sales services for teams that need help with the work itself: marketinginaction.xyz/services.