How to Build a Website With AI (2024 Guide)

Building a professional website can have a painstaking learning curve.

While the traditional way offers complete control over how you want your website to be, it demands a significant investment of time, effort, and technical know-how in return.

However, in the past 5 years, the speed of integrating artificial intelligence into web development has greatly accelerated, making the process faster, more efficient, and accessible to everyone.

It goes without saying that if you’re not using AI to help build your website today, you’re wasting hours of precious time that could be better spent on more important aspects.

In this article, written with beginners in mind with no coding knowledge, we will explore how you can use AI to help automate different parts of the web development and design process, which includes using an AI website builder to create a professional website.

How Does AI Help in Automating Website Development and Design?

There are several benefits of using AI for web development and design. There are too many to list here, but we will go over the more important ones:

1. Reduce Decision Fatigue: Making decisions such as choosing the color scheme, handling website accessibility, and defining web page layouts takes a lot of brain power. With AI web development and design tools, you get a headstart, giving you more time to focus on your more critical aspects, whether you’re an e-commerce, a company, or a small business.
2. Automated SEO: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a complex and time-consuming task, requiring deep understanding and constant updates. AI simplifies this process by automatically handling it with the AI site builder.
3. Streamline Web Content Generation: Whether it’s product descriptions, multilingual website content, images (logos, site favicons, stock photos, etc.), or legal policies, AI tools can provide you with a solid base to work from, saving hours of manual work.
4. Better Understanding of Website Users’ Behaviours: By analyzing user data, AI uses technologies like heatmaps to visualize where users click most, how long they stay on a page, and their navigation patterns. Understanding this is crucial if you’re looking to understand your users better.

What Is the Best AI Website Builder?

Choosing the right AI website builder is essential and will save you hours of research. There are several key considerations, including ease of use, customization options, pricing, hosting, and specific key features like drag-and-drop and custom fonts.

We’ve also considered whether the tool is an AI website generator (meaning it just generates a custom website upfront and has you manually doing the rest) versus an AI website builder (allowing you to incrementally update each part of the website using AI); the latter is what we mostly want.

There’s so much more, and honestly, going through all of this for the first time can be overwhelming.

Hence, to help you, we’ve written a separate guide going over the best AI website builders, which goes over all of the various key considerations and compares them side-by-side.

After evaluating various options, such as Zyro, Framer AI, Wix ADI, 10Web, and others, Durable stands out as the best choice.

To keep it short, here are some of the reasons why we believe Durable is the best AI-powered website builder:

• User-Friendly Interface: Durable offers an easy-to-use interface to create functional websites, perfect for beginners without any coding knowledge
• Competitive Pricing: Being one of the few free AI website builders, you don’t need to provide your credit card to try the free plan out
• Automated SEO and Security: Every site you create comes with automated SEO for your web pages and DDoS protections, SSL, and a global CDN
• AI Integration: Durable balances automated AI-driven design with manual customization options, providing flexibility and automation

How to Build a Website With AI: Step-by-Step

We will now guide you, step-by-step, through the process of creating a website using an AI builder. As aforementioned, we will use Durable (read our Durable AI review).

1. Building Our Website Using Durable’s AI-Powered Website Builder

Start by going to Durable.co and clicking the Build your site button in the upper right corner to sign up for an account.

You’ll be prompted to provide details about your business or service. Durable, under the hood, uses natural language processing (NLP) to tailor the AI-generated website to your specifications. For this tutorial, I will enter “Web Development”. Once done, click Next.

Now, you will be asked to enter where you’re located. Enter your desired location and click Next.

Now, before we view our AI-generated website, we have to provide the name of our website. This can be your company, business, or even your own name. Click Generate Website to proceed.

Durable will start creating your website, a process that typically takes 1-2 minutes. It meticulously assembles each component of your entire website and even gives you your own logo. Upon completion, you’ll receive a notification that your website has been generated.

You will want to make further customizations to the website, which you can begin by clicking the Customize button at the top right.

To make customizations, you will want to create an account with Durable. It’s free to do so. Once registered, you can interact with any element of your website to either manually edit or use Durable’s AI to automatically regenerate text, stock images, styles, or entire sections.

Let’s try to regenerate our Hero section.

Click Regenerate and choose Entire section (don’t worry, you can revert back by clicking Discard at the top left).

The result is significantly cleaner now. Additionally, I manually adjusted the button shape and added a diagonal divider at the bottom for a more professional appearance.

You can make similar manual adjustments by navigating to Edit then Style.

To change your font to a custom font or add a browser icon (favicon) for your website, click on the theme settings icon as shown below.

One of the most important things to make your website look more professional is to add more pages like a blog, about us, privacy policy, legal and terms, FAQs, etc.

To add a new page, simply click the “+” icon in the center. Durable will AI generate those pages as well.

Durable also offers custom add-on widgets that you can add to your website, such as cookie notices and messenger chat integrations (Telegram, Messenger, WhatsApp).

We will add the Cookie Notice widget. Once you’ve added it, you can tweak the text.

To check for website responsiveness, click on the devices icon as shown below, and click between Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile to see how your website looks on different devices.

Now, before we hit publish, let’s preview our site live to view it as how our website visitors will. To do so, click on the preview icon (box with arrow), and you will be prompted to save your changes. Click Save and preview.

If you’re on the free plan, you will be provided a free domain with .mydurable.com subdomain. To get custom domains or add your own domain, you will need to upgrade to the Starter pricing plan.

For now, let’s just stick to our current website address (https://fritz2.mydurable.com/) and click Preview.

If everything looks good in preview mode, you can proceed to click Publish below to have your changes take effect.

Your website is now live on the internet. You can view your live website by clicking on the View website button.

One more thing you will see is Search indexing, which allows your website to get indexed and ranked on Google. SEO is managed for you automatically, so we recommend leaving this option enabled.

We’ve successfully created a professional-looking website in just a matter of minutes without any coding. Take your time to get creative with Durable’s AI capabilities.

2. Getting Web Design Ideas With AI Using Tools Like DALLE-3 and Midjourney

One of the best ways to improve the perceived value of your business, product, or service is to improve upon your website’s design.

We’ve covered the best AI image generator tools previously and found DALLE-3 and Midjourney to be two of the best AI image generators for this purpose.

Both of these are capable of using their state-of-the-art models to produce near-realistic images, layouts, and design concepts based on the textual descriptions you give them.

They also make it easier to brainstorm and visualize ideas iteratively by trying out different design directions, all without the need for sketches or wireframes (though you can do that as well).

To generate a web design example using DALLE-3, you will need to have access to ChatGPT Plus.

Once you do, enter a similar prompt as follows with your ideas:

/high

“Create a image of a landing page of a web development agency based in san francisco, targeting startups. Blue color palette. modern minimalism web design style.”

Alternatively, you can use Midjourney to do the same. Personally, we’ve found Midjourney to be the better of the two, especially with the current version 5, which produces better results handling descriptive sentences over comma-separated keywords.

Once you have gotten your base design, you can subsequently prompt the AI image generator with changes to better fit your brand identity, taking into consideration your website’s color palette, design elements, and layouts, to name a few.

3. Coming Up With a Domain Name Using Domains GPT

Choosing the right domain name is a critical step in establishing your website’s identity and, at times, can take hours, if not days, to find the right one.

AI domain generator tools have made this process easier by generating creative and relevant domain name suggestions based on the keywords that you provide about your service, business, or product.

A great AI domain generator we personally use is Domains GPT. This tool enables the creation of brandable, two-word combinations, portmanteaus, non-English, or alternatively spelled domain names, all of which are available for registration.

Once you’ve got your domain name of choice, proceed to Namecheap, a trusted domain marketplace, to buy the domain name.

4. Using AI to Generate Logos and Brand Identity for Website

While platforms like Durable can automatically create a logo and other branding assets, the output may not match the quality of work produced by a professional graphic designer.

For a quick and cost-effective way to generate high-quality, unique logos and images for your new AI-generated website, use DALLE-3 or Midjourney.

Once you’ve got your logo, you will want to convert it to SVG or another appropriate format using Adobe Illustrator or a free online SVG convertor before exporting it for your website.

5. Utilizing AI to Improve Website Structure and Add More Key Pages

A reliable, high-quality website involves more than just an appealing homepage.

By adding key pages like About Us, Services, FAQs, Contact, and Legal pages, among others, you improve your website’s online presence, perceived value, and reputability. AI tools like ChatGPT can help brainstorm and provide a baseline for you to work from and get started.

To get started, simply go to ChatGPT and enter a prompt like the following:

“I have a _ website. What are the sorts of pages and layouts that I need to have besides the homepage (landing page)?”

For more detailed suggestions on the structure of each specific page of your website, consider providing granular prompts, like:

“I run a _and have a website, can you provide the web design structure (not code) for the different sections I need to have for the landing page”

Conclusion

That wraps up this lengthy guide. It’s important to understand that the field of AI is rapidly changing every day, and the capabilities of what AI can do for web development and design are getting more autonomous and effective.

Whether you’re a complete newbie to web development or a seasoned full-stack web developer, the use of AI website builders and tools for web development can significantly help shift our priorities and time spent on more important business decisions and simplify tasks like SEO, content generation, design brainstorming and website development and much more.

If you are interested in learning more about the various AI tools and services available, feel free to check out our blog.

FAQs – How to Build a Website With AI