How to go from a blank page to a live website with AI tonight

Pick one tool, prompt a small site, hit publish, then check the domain, the deploy, and every sentence — the model drafted it, and you are the publisher.

A prompt can draft a page in minutes. A live URL is a publish — those are different jobs, and only one of them is yours.

Tonight is one site, not a stack. Pick v0, Lovable, or Cursor plus Vercel. Official docs for each get you from a prompt to a public URL. A second tool does not make the first one honest.

v0: sign in at v0.app. Describe the page in plain language. Iterate in the chat. Official quickstart: Publish in the header, confirm the Vercel project, visibility, and domain, then wait for production. First publish creates a Vercel project and a stable vercel.app URL. Later edits need Publish Changes. Preview is not that public URL.

Lovable: sign up at lovable.dev. Describe the site. Click around the preview. Official getting-started: Publish in the top right, keep or edit the suggested lovable.app address, then publish again. Hosting docs: the live site is a snapshot. Preview updates immediately. Production updates only when you Publish changes. Custom domains are a paid-plan step, not the free URL.

Cursor plus Vercel: install Cursor, open an empty folder, Agent with Cmd I, and ask for one page — hours, address, and contact you can prove. Review the diff. Official Vercel getting-started: vercel login, then vercel for a preview, vercel --prod for production. Vercel assigns a vercel.app name first-come, first-served. It is not a reserved brand.

What the model drafts versus what you still check: it will invent hours, bios, prices, photos, and a phone number. Replace every claim before you share the link. Domain: who owns it, which DNS (the phone book that points a name at a server), and whether HTTPS — the lock-icon encrypted connection — is on the name you think. Deploy: open the public URL in a private window. Content: your words, your contact, your facts. A draft is not a site until those three hold.