Can AI design a website?

AI can absolutely design you a website, and it’s getting better at it all the time. Fire up ChatGPT or Claude, explain what you need, and it’ll come up with a pretty good-looking design. I’ve done it myself, and I still do for some client sites.

What AI does well

AI is good at consistency. It picks a few key design themes and carries them through the whole website, and it keeps everything evenly spaced, with a nice, neat layout. For someone who isn’t a designer, that’s a big help: you can end up with something that looks really good.

Where it falls short

Where it falls down is originality. A lot of AI-designed websites look extremely similar. If I ask an AI tool to design three different websites on three different days, I get three very similar-looking websites, sometimes with identical fonts and identical layouts.

So if you want a website that looks like your business and nobody else’s, you need a person involved.

Why AI websites look the same

AI tools work by predicting the most likely answer, based on the huge number of websites they’ve learned from. Ask for a website without much direction and you get the most likely website: the same popular fonts, the same layouts and the same safe colours. In effect, it’s the average of everything it has seen.

That’s great for a neat, consistent design, and it’s the opposite of original.

How I use AI

I sometimes design with help from AI. If a client wants something quick and inexpensive, I’ll use one of the many AI design tools out there, such as Claude Design or Figma Make, to put a design together. They’re fantastic at that. Then I go over it and add some of my own design flourish, and we have a solid starting point for the website. (There’s more on prices in How much does a website cost?)

For bigger projects, or for clients who are looking for something more, I design it myself or work with an outside agency. AI has its place, but it isn’t good for everything.

Watch out for AI-written words

The other thing to watch out for is the content. AI has stock expressions and ways of formatting text that give it away. It loves lists of three, and it loves “X, not Y” statements, like “It’s not just a website, it’s your digital shop window.”

Most readers are pretty good at spotting AI-written content these days. If you want your website to feel authentic, write the words yourself and only use AI to help you edit them. Original content matters to Google too.

Should you use an AI website builder?

Overall, AI has been a really positive thing for simple websites. With a website builder like Wix, you can use its AI design feature to build some pretty nice-looking pages. That’s exactly who those tools are aimed at: people who want to build a website themselves, without bringing in a professional. For them, it’s perfect.

If you want to take your website to the next level, with that extra design flourish that makes it look individual and professional, that’s when to bring in a person.

Tell me about your business and I’ll tell you honestly whether an AI website builder would do the job, or whether it’s worth having a person design it.