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How to Design Websites With AI in 2024 + Best Practices

on 26 Aug 2024, by Bogdan, in Blog, Cloud, Guides

by Bogdan

Are you looking to build a website using AI but don’t know where to start? This guide is here to help.

Designing websites today is so much easier than it used to be, thanks to AI. You don’t have to be a great web designer to get it done. In fact, you can build complete websites for yourself and your clients using simple language commands.

However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds. There are numerous AI tools to choose from, as well as several design methods and best practices you’ll need to apply to create high-quality websites. But don’t fret! This is what this article is here for.

In this post, we’ll walk you through how to design websites with AI including the best practices. Let’s kick it off by looking at the evolution of AI in web design.

The Evolution of AI in Web Design

AI is not new to web design and development, although its role before 2017 was somewhat rudimentary. It was mainly used in basic tasks like creating basic layouts, color palettes, etc. So what exactly happened in 2017?

A Google research team pioneered the invention of transformers – the type of AI/ML models that ushered in generative AI. Generative AI paved the way for using AI to build websites. It is behind most of the AI tools we use today including:

Large language models - Gemini, Chat GPT, and Microsoft Copilot.
Image generation models - DALL-E.

The same technology is responsible for the modern-day AI website builders adopted by industry-leading SaaS providers like Brizy, Wix, 10web, etc. These website builders can create entire websites from simple language commands.

In essence, AI in web design has gone from basic layout suggestions to building entire websites for users. Studies report that this has improved the productivity of a third of web designers with about 50% of them already using these AI tools regularly.

Wondering how to build a website using AI? Let’s go over the AI-powered web design tools you can use to get it done.

AI-Powered Web Design Tools

There are tons of AI-powered tools available to help take the work of designing websites from scratch off your hands. There are tools for everything, from layout generation, image creation, and A/B testing to boost user experience to complete AI website builders. Starting with AI website builders, let’s cover them one after the other.

1: AI Website Builders

Instead of going through the tedious process of planning, coming up with a design, and creating a website, why not let AI do everything for you? This is what AI website builders are here for.

As mentioned earlier, plenty of industry-leading SaaS providers have an AI website builder offering. For this guide, we’ll focus on the top two: Brizy’s AI Website Builder and Wix's AI Website Builder.

Brizy AI Website Builder

The Brizy AI Website Builder enables you to build ready-to-use websites and landing pages in under 30 seconds. All you have to do is provide vital information like your business name and industry – the AI builder will do the rest.

This process is much easier if you have this information in your Google Business Profile. All you’ll have to do is search for it and the AI builder will fill in this information and generate a design in no time. It will write copy for you, generate and place industry-specific images, and optimize the site’s layout for you.

The best part? You’ll have the final say on what the final version of the website looks like. After creating your design, the AI builder allows you to edit each element to suit your brand or the needs of the project you’re building for your client. It creates all types of websites including online stores, business websites, portfolios, etc.

Brizy AI Website Builder tops this list because it is the industry-first White Label AI Builder. This means that you can rebrand the website builder, which comes with the built-in AI, as your own and resell it to your customers.

Wix AI Website Builder

Wix is another example of a website builder using AI. If you’re looking for a more specific option, then the Wix AI Website Builder is the AI web design tool for you. Essentially, you’ll have to walk through this AI builder through every step of understanding your business and the type of website you want to build over a series of inputs.

When giving a description, you’ll provide extra information such as:

Where your business is located.
It’s unique selling points.
Any other additional information.

With this information in place, it will create a website matching your needs. You can then proceed to the Wix editor to refine it.

2: AI Image Generators

Images are extremely important in web design because they engage site visitors and help them understand your content better. Suppose the images generated by AI website builders don’t suit your website, you can use AI image generation models to get more accurate images. These tools relieve you from the cost of purchasing images from stock agencies.

Alternatively, you can use these image generation models to give you ideas on what your website should look like. This is a great way to break through a creative block.

DALL-E2

DALL-E can create realistic images based on text prompts. It can understand natural language accurately and create images based on your instructions. If you can imagine a real-world image and describe it, DALL-E will do its best to replicate it.

You can use it to create real-world images but with a business’s mascot placed inside. This allows images to fit the website’s design or purpose of a landing page better.

Midjourney

Midjourney is also a powerful image generator like DALL-E, but it is suitable for producing dreamlike or artistic types of images. It can effectively replicate various art styles. However, you’ll have less control over the final product, compared to DALL-E. So if you’re creating an artistic type of website, Midjourney is a great option for generating the images you’ll use in it.

3: Large Language Models(LLMs) for creating the structure of the website

Having a clear idea of how to structure a new website can be challenging. LLMs like Chat GPT can become your makeshift web designer, providing you with ideas on which elements to include and where to include them.

Here’s how you can go about brainstorming website design ideas using Chat GPT. It is important to know that you may not engineer the best prompt on your own. So ask ChatGPT to be your prompt engineer.

You should get a response similar to this:

Next, you’ll use these questions to form a prompt.

Then feed the prompt to ChatGPT to create a website design idea for you.

You can review the response and refine the structure as needed. This response will serve as the blueprint for creating your website.

Putting website structure design aside, you also need to think about the content as it will impact user experience. AI content creation tools like Jasper AI, Copy.ai, etc., can help you write high-converting copy for your site’s pages. We’ve covered this and many more in our 50 AI marketing tools to scale your business guide.

Moving on, let’s turn our attention to responsive design and look at how AI can help design responsive websites.

Designing responsive websites with AI

Responsive design is important, now more than ever as users access websites from various devices. It’s not just desktops alone, in fact, studies show that as of 2024, 60.67% of website traffic comes from mobile devices.

Today, having a responsive website isn’t simply a nice-to-have feature, but a necessity. Fortunately, AI can help you create responsive and adaptive website designs.

Automated responsive design generation

The AI website builders we covered earlier are built to automatically generate responsive websites that adapt to the user’s screen. The website’s buttons, images, text, and even the navigation menus will adjust to fit smaller screens. Here is an example of how a website built with Brizy AI website builder looks across different screens.

Desktop view

Mobile phone view

Tablet view

With Brizy, you can take it further and edit this design to fit seamlessly across all devices. Brizy gives you the option to work while viewing your website from a tablet and mobile phone’s screen. Here you can resize each element and space them out so users won’t have trouble clicking buttons or links.

What’s more, you can choose to hide sections such as the hero, which you feel wouldn’t look good on a mobile phone’s screen.

AI-powered image optimization

Obtaining the optimal balance between image size and quality is no easy feat. In some situations shrinking to fit a screen size an image directly will cause a significant dip in its quality. You need to optimize these images to make them flexible and allow them to dynamically adjust to the user’s screen resolution.

AI-powered image optimization tools such as Cloudinary enable you to create responsive images. Cloudinary prepares your images for different resolutions so that the user’s device will only load the image designated for its screen size. It also offers an automatic selection feature that delivers the best image format based on the user's browser.

Up to this point, we’ve been looking at how AI can help you to come up with great-looking website designs. Remember that a great design that doesn’t cater to your users is pointless. So let’s go over AI in UI/UX design and see how AI can help you come up with designs that cater to user experience needs.

AI in UI/UX Design

With UI/UX design, you’ll create designs that are not only visually appealing but also easy to use. AI systems can help you with UI/UX design in two ways:

Prototyping UI/UX designs.
Optimizing your website designs through UX testing.

Prototyping designs with AI

Before investing your time, energy, and resources into creating a new design, you’ll come up with some prototypes. As a UI/UX designer, you can sketch these prototypes free-hand or use a digital tool like Adobe XD. You know first-hand that you can’t exactly ship these sketches to users to get feedback.

This is where AI comes in. AI tools like UIzard can convert these sketches into digital editable mockup versions of your design. You can then customize them further and share them with your team or audience to get feedback.

In case you haven’t drawn your sketches, you can use text prompts to create prototypes.

Optimizing your website designs for UX with AI

After generating your prototypes, you don’t need to go to market to get feedback. You can leverage AI to predict how users will likely react to your design. An AI tool that can help you do this is Neurons – a solution built to predict human behavior.

It uses predictive AI to give you an insight into how users will likely react to your designs. This allows you to optimize your designs before conducting more resource-demanding and expensive tests.

There we have it! Some tips and tools you can use to design your website with AI. Having the right tools is only the first step, you’ll need to understand the best practices to get the best out of them.

Best practices for designing a website with AI

The AI tools we’ve covered here are well-capable. But to get the best out of them and build beautiful, user-friendly websites, you’ll need to implement the best practices for designing websites with AI while using them. Keeping that in mind, here are some of these best practices.

Prioritize user experience

As much as your website should be visually appealing, it should also be user-friendly. To make your website user-friendly, ensure the following:

The text is easily readable. Use font families commonly supported by all major browsers.
Space elements out appropriately.
Ensure all buttons, links, etc. work accordingly.
It has a simple, easy-to-use navigation menu.

In addition, ensure it is accessible to people with disabilities. Check Website Accessibility Content Guidelines to learn how to do this.

Combine AI with human oversight and expertise

While AI certainly makes your work easier, you shouldn’t over-rely on it. Tweaking its output is important as it allows you to have the final say on what the website will look like. As the website owner, you understand your brand, goals, and target audience best. You can edit the AI’s output to best suit these parameters.

Remember that AI lacks the human critical thinking, expertise, and creative process. So don’t use it as a replacement for such.

Test and optimize regularly

Trends and user preferences aren’t static. Consequently, after creating your website with AI, leverage regular A/B testing and analytics to identify the areas of your website that need improvements to ensure it remains relevant.

Ethical considerations

It is important to note that some AI-powered tools are prone to biases. The biases may show up when the tool is asked to complete a task for which it wasn’t trained properly. Alternatively, some AI models have been trained with data leaning toward specific socio-political, religious, or societal ideologies. This is why you should always review each piece of content written by the AI tool and edit it to eliminate these biases.

Protect user privacy

If the AI tools you use work with user data, for instance, UX testing tools, ensure these tools comply with privacy regulations such as the GDPR. Be transparent and inform users that your site uses AI. Failure to do so might land you in some trouble with the respective regulatory body.

Use AI to Design Better Websites Faster

AI in web design makes creating websites faster and so much easier. With little to no web design experience, you can create impactful websites for yourself or your clients, thanks to AI. In this guide, we’ve looked at how to use AI to build a website. There are several tools to help you do it from AI website builders, image generators, and image optimization tools to AI-powered prototyping tools.

You’ll have all the help you can get. When building a website with AI, consider the best practices we’ve covered in this guide to get the best outcome. So decide on a website you want to build and use this guide to pick the right AI tools and follow the best practices to design better websites faster. Want to test it for yourself? We encourage you to take Brizy AI for a spin and see the end result in no more than 30 seconds.

Frequently Asked Questions

This is simply the process of utilizing Artificial Intelligence in web design. It involves using AI-powered tools to help you craft your websites.

They accelerate the design process by generating designs instantly after being fed simple text prompts. They also help to improve designs through image optimizations, responsive design, and UX testing.

No. AI lacks the human critical thinking, expertise, and creative process and shouldn’t be used as a replacement for human designers.

There are several of them, including the Brizy AI website builder, DALL-E, Neurons, etc. We’ve covered a bunch of them in this guide, so be sure to go through it to discover them.

AI helps to improve the UX design process for UI/UX designers. It allows them to prototype hand-drawn sketches into a shippable product that can garner feedback from potential users. It also helps them to predict how users will react to their designs. We’ve covered this extensively in this guide.

AI is best placed to make web design more personalized because of its data processing capabilities. There has also been talk about AI in spatial computing, i.e. creating 3D environments accessible from various devices. On top of that, the quality of the designs is expected to get better and less generic.

Article by Bogdan

Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io