The use of AI to design and build websites is obviously something we have been keeping a very close eye on, as website design contributes to a good proportion of our projects and team employment. For those reading in a hurry or using dictation tools – there’s nothing to worry about – at the moment at least. Here’s why;
Same designs over and over
We have played with many AI website generators, delivering prompts much more detailed than the average user would to give the AI a helping hand in generating a decent looking website. AI follows what it knows, if there is a trend, it will follow it.
We have a wedding directory website project in the studio at the moment, so we thought we’d see what designs AI can produce for us. Each design was very generic, looking like almost every other wedding directory website currently available.
We don’t want our website designs to look the same however, we want ours to stand out and be recognised.
Inconsistent design that deviates from the spec
We have our initial design, but let’s issue some more AI prompts to make it unique. We ask to remove rounded corners and drop shadows, something that should affect just a few assets on the website design, but other areas are changed also. We ask to put the other changes back, which diverts the original design further.
Several of the AI tools allowed us to ‘undo’ commands and revert to a previous state, we found this to be invaluable.
We started to get to a place we were relatively happy with the homepage design, so let’s goo and create some more key pages. Using the same design style from the homepage, create a search page. In all but one of the AI tools, the search page created whole new assets that didn’t match the assets created for the homepage. Each page didn’t look consistent.
AI website generators are producing awful code
After lots of fiddling, the website design is now ok, so let’s build it. Each of the websites were placed onto our development server and made public so that search engines can interact with it. We asked Google and Bing to browse the websites and tell us what they believed the websites to be about.
Only one AI tool website was correctly identified as a wedding directory. This is due to the code being produced by the AI website development tools. Page content was hidden behind code, making it difficult for search engines to actually index the website.
Clean easy to understand code is essential. From the front end, the website can appear to be similar, but clean code delivers pages faster, works with accessibility tools and makes the website accessible to search engines, which helps your search engine ranking and drives traffic to your website.
AI website generation from a customer perspective
Our own experience wasn’t great, for the wedding wesbite above we fully designed and built it ourselves. At time of writing it is being populated and final features being added and should be live within a few months.
Over the last 18 months, two of our previous customers have created new websites using AI. We have been asked to continue helping with hosting and SEO, which has been a perfect opportunity for us to compare how our hand designed and developed website compares to their AI generated website.
initially, page views dropped dramatically when the AI website went live. This was due to the AI website creating new links for pages, meaning old pages with a Google ranking no longer worked. We created a link between the two, informing Google of the new pages, which helped greatly.
We wrote some scripts to help search engines index the new website, informing them of all page urls etc. This worked well and helped the search engines recognise that there was a new website.
Over the coming months, the search engines visited the website less and less often. New pages were only found when we specifically asked Google to index them, whereas before they would be found organically.
The customers whilst initially happy with their websites notice a reduction is targeted leads. The website isn’t working as well as it did previously, mostly due to the poor back end code they produced.
Fast forward to today, we are in talks with one of our customers to create a new website again, just 18 months after the launch of their AI website. This conversation is actually what has prompted this blog post.
Conclusion, is AI killing the web design agency?
It’s not killing it, but it’s not helping it. Projects are being lost to AI tools which is hurting the industry, but those agencies who can ride this wave will likely find the customer returns down the line. It all depends on what the customer wants/needs/expects from their website.
A simple brochure website which someone can view if they enter the website address and AI is a great tool. A lead driver and key business tool is where an agency still excels.
Notes: I have deliberately not mentioned the exact AI website design tools we have used just to avoid any nasty letters coming our way. AI certainly has it’s place and can help in many ways, but as a full solution, to replace a talented website design and development team, we found it’s currently way off the mark.
If you want to investigate a website design project with us, do get in contact for a no obligation chat.