I Built a Website with AI. These are the Results.

I spent the past few days playing around with Framer's free AI website tool.

I thought it'd be cool to have a "dream site" within seconds, and the process to get started is fairly straightforward.

Similar to ChatGPT, you can write a short description about the kind of site you want to create, then Framer will generate a website page based on your requests.

So today, I want to share my initial tests & results.

The first thing I did was enter this prompt:

I figured that would be a good starting point and produce a semi-accurate design.

Unfortunately, here's the first result:

As you can tell, it's pretty barebones.

The text is as generic as can be—e.g. "MONEY" as the headline—and the designs are just templates within the platform.

And the background is.. yellow?

It's almost like it ignored half of the prompt, or it's not trained well enough to pick up different design requests.

Luckily, you can alter the colors & font types, or regenerate a whole new design:

After changing a few things around within the template, I found a style that felt a little bit friendlier:

Click to View the Current Website

I really like the brown, black, and white color scheme and think I'm going to continue building out this template until all of the pages are created and it's a functioning website.

But overall, the AI-generated design is barely usable:

• The images vary from a whale to various forests and random cityscapes
• The copywriting sounds like AI
• The layouts are basic, templated sections
• Only one page can be generated at a time, so it's difficult to create a flow and cohesiveness throughout the whole site

On the bright side, it followed basic SEO best practices & used an H1 tag for the site's header (mentioned in last week's newsletter):

Since the first result wasn't the best, I tried again with a more intentional, specific prompt:

And I think the second version may be worse:

Click to View the Website

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider this "beautiful" - especially as the hero section of a website:

Not only does it feel somber, there are no call-to-actions and no text that describes what the business itself actually is.

So before leaving AI alone for awhile, I tried regenerating the first prompt a few times and ended up with one design that wasn't too bad:

Click to View the Website

It's still very basic and the copywriting is odd, but I like the colors, different image layouts, and call-to-action placements.

🎡 The Takeaway

From my brief experience, I don't think there's a valid use for AI-designed websites yet. I wasn't too impressed with the initial results, and there are plenty of templates built by real people who know what works that I wouldn't outsource such an important piece of your digital presence to artificial intelligence. Yet.

I'm sure it'll get better over time but as of February 2024, you're better off working with a designer or using pre-made templates from Squarespace, Framer, or Webflow.

Also Read: How to Build a Website that Converts: The 5 Essentials