About
The method, and who’s behind it
Prompt & Mortar is one person, a method that works, and two live websites that prove it. Here’s the honest version of all three.
Who I am
I’m Bennie Eksteen. I’ve worked in civil design, engineering support, and construction administration since 1986 — plans, technical reports, construction documentation, RFIs, submittals, inspections, and municipal reviews. Decades of turning messy real-world requirements into documents that hold up under scrutiny.
I’m also an indie author and publisher. That side of my life is what pushed me onto the web: books need websites, and I didn’t want to rent one from a website builder forever.
What I’m not
My background is civil design, engineering support, and construction administration. I’m not a professional web developer—and that is the point of this site. If building a real website required being a developer, Prompt & Mortar wouldn’t need to exist.
What I built, and how
I built qbchristianlife.com — a complete site for my publishing work — and this site, promptandmortar.com, using exactly the method the guides here teach: describing what I wanted to Claude in plain English, keeping the files in GitHub, and publishing with Netlify. No code written by hand, no developer hired, no website-builder subscription.
Both sites are live right now, and you’re reading one of them. That’s the only proof this site offers — no invented testimonials, no made-up numbers. Real builds you can go look at.
Why Prompt & Mortar exists
Somewhere in the middle of the second build, I realized the hard part was never the technology — it was that nobody explains the whole path in plain English. Plenty of posts show Claude generating a pretty page. Almost none walk you through getting the files out, putting them somewhere safe, and actually publishing — the steps where non-technical people quietly give up.
So that’s what this site is: the full path, blank screen to live site, written for business owners who describe things in plain English and want to own what they build. The guides are free and stay free. The Builder’s Kit exists for people who’d rather skip the trial-and-error — a shortcut, never a toll gate.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or a site you built with these guides that I should see: promptandmortar@gmail.com. A real person reads it — the same one who wrote this page.