Will AI replace website designers?
If you’ve been wondering how AI will affect the web design industry, you’re not alone!
In the quickly evolving world of AI, it can feel overwhelming as the tech progresses, and last year I definitely found myself panicking over whether ‘AI would take my job’ and ruin the website design industry.
But after taking some time to explore the current AI website design tools out there, and reconnect with my business vision and goals, I have some (more positive) conclusions to share!
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*Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links where I get a small commission if you make a purchase, so thank you in advance for your support! Please know I would never recommend anything that I don’t personally LOVE myself.
What is an AI website builder?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the ability of technology to perform tasks that would usually be performed by a human. But more specifically, the AI that most people refer to today is machine learning artificial intelligence. This type of AI is able to perform tasks on its own and learn how to improve as it receives more data and input.
An AI website builder is therefore a tool that can perform a task (ie. generate a website) on its own, and can learn how to improve what it creates over time.
As with all these tools, a human input is required to kick things off and start the process, and AI website creators require a human to ‘prompt’ them with information about the project first so it can understand what kind of website and style to create.
Initially when I learned about these tools, I was admittedly concerned for the future of my website design business 😬 and had a lot of questions like:
Will AI tools make it so easy to create a website that designers won’t be needed?
Why would someone hire a website designer when AI can do it quicker and cheaper?
If you’re at this stage as well, please keep reading because I’ve outlined several reasons why we definitely don’t need to panic…
Will AI replace website designers?
Currently, AI can’t handle complex or large re-design projects
I recently tested out 5 different AI website builders and I can safely say none of them created anything near the quality of a professionally designed website (they all looked like simple templates).
Particularly for large, complex websites, or clients who need their large, complex websites re-designed, I can’t see the technology being good enough even in the next couple of years to overtake what an expert designer can do.
It will improve for sure, but not enough in the immediate future to make me concerned.
Currently there’s a lack of integration possibilities
Again I’m sure this will improve exponentially, but right now you still need human input and technical knowledge to add more complex plugins, integrations and connections to websites (eg. adding third party email marketing tools, affiliate programs, in-depth ecommerce features and more).
If you can create it with Ai, so can everyone else (ie. it’s not unique)
Like I said, a lot of the AI sites being generated all look pretty similar, because they’re all based on the same templates. Yes, a client could go and generate a website with one of these tools, but so could their competitors, and it would come up with a pretty similar output because they’re not sophisticated enough yet to get more unique.
Ai still requires technical & design input for good results
A main reason why clients hire website designers is because they don’t have any technical or design experience to create something themselves. If they did, they could just set up a site using a pre-made template themselves!
Right now, AI web builders still require technical knowledge to set up and launch, and design experience from someone to actually refine the output and know whether it looks good and will ‘convert’ for the client.
There’s a distinct lack of empathy-led design
The one thing AI tools don’t have is empathy, and this is a huge part of a website designer’s job (as a human!). We need to empathise with our clients to understand the deeper goals and values they have for their website AND have empathy for their customers to understand how they’ll react to design.
For example, an AI might generate a website with a newsletter pop-up form on it because it knows this can create good conversions. However this might be less of a priority for your client, who would prefer the design to be non-intrusive, and they know their customers would be turned off by this.
We are always adapting to advances in technology (eg. website builders vs coding!)
‘We’ve adapted before, and we’ll adapt again.’
This is an important mantra for any business owner! Just think - websites used to have to be coded from scratch, and when website building platforms like Squarespace and Wix came along, designers/developers worried these were going to ‘take their jobs’.
But they didn’t. They just created more options for designers/developers to speed up their process, and created different types of jobs for people to specialise in certain platforms (like me as a Squarespace designer!).
There will always be clients who don’t have the time (or inclination) to DIY a website
At the end of the day, regardless of how easy AI makes website building, there will ALWAYS be clients who don’t have time or simply don’t want to do it themselves. They might just be a different ideal client than your current ones.
eg. Cooking your own food now is SO easy and quick thanks to healthy microwave/instant meals. But there are still plenty of people who have private chefs!
Squarespace AI: Is it any good?
The website platform I use - Squarespace* - have recently partnered with OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) to integrate several different AI tools into their features:
Squarespace Blueprint AI
This AI feature lets new users build their own template to get started on Squarespace based on the needs of their business. It takes the user through the steps of what pages they need, what features, and asks them to choose from a selection of pre-designed colour palettes too.
The result is a very simple bare-bones template that the user can begin their website with, but it’s still incredibly basic (and looks like a template!).
Once the template is set up, Squarespace asks the user to give more information about their business, and then uses this to populate the website’s pages with copy.
You’re only able to fill in a certain amount of characters when describing your business, so you’re not able to give the AI much context!
There result is therefore a very basic copy output (shown in the template screenshot above); it feels generic, lacking personality, and doesn’t follow important copywriting frameworks and concepts either.
Of course, this is all meant to be used as a ‘starting point’ for non-techy users to get set up quickly, so it might be useful in that respect to just kick-off getting started.
Want to give it a try? Go here to their website and click ‘get started’!*
Squarespace ai copywriting
Once you’ve set up your site, or if you have an existing Squarespace website, you can also edit your ‘AI Brand Identity’ (ie. the ‘custom instructions’ that Squarespace AI uses to know what copy to write) in your website settings.
Once you’ve added this, you can start using Squarespace AI on any text across your website (this is available on all Squarespace 7.1 sites).
Just click on a text block and you’ll see the new lightning bolt icon ⚡️.
You can click this and then type in a prompt to help you write copy, and it will use your ‘Brand Identity’ information in the settings to help.
You can also ask it to edit the existing text (rather than write from scratch), by asking it to do things like ‘lengthen’, ‘shorten’, or ‘make more impactful’, ‘make more succinct’ etc.
^ I think those use cases are quite helpful, however I would advise caution when getting Squarespace AI to write your copy for you from scratch.
Because of the limited prompt space (and therefore the limited context you’re able to provide the AI), the copy it creates is pretty bland, and it lacks personality. Anyone can get AI to write content for them, so in order to stand out from the crowd, you really want to be editing this yourself and sharing your own stories, expertise and anecdotes.
Squarespace AI SEO & Product Descriptions
You’ll also notice the little lighting bolt ⚡️ icon when editing your site SEO description and product descriptions in Squarespace, and I think this can be really useful to help give a starting point and inspiration for these trickier areas of copy!
Coming soon: Squarespace AI Video & Course summaries
For videos and courses hosted on your Squarespace website*, you’ll soon be able to create AI generated summaries of the content of these. I think this is awesome as it’s a great, easy way to make your content more accessible for different learning needs and preferences!
Learn more on the Squarespace website* and give their AI tools a try!
How to harness AI as a website designer?
speed up the start of your website design process
One of the ways we can adapt our businesses to this new technology is by incorporating it into our own processes to help make our workflows quicker! This can give us the edge above designers who are burying their heads in the sand about AI.
There are lots of AI tools out there that either help create simple base templates (like Squarespace AI*) or can help you to create wireframes incredibly quickly before you start designing. I tried this with Relume AI and thought it was great!
quickly create website demo content
Is your client stuck or hasn’t provided content for you for the website project yet? This can be tricky because handing over a draft with ‘lorem ipsum’ and boring stock photography is never going to wow them or help them give feedback.
This is where you could use AI content generation tools or AI image generation tools (I personally love Leonardo AI at the moment!) to help you create custom content really quickly, to help your clients better imagine their website elements all working together.
Generate ideas & keep you moving when you’re stuck
AI chatbots like ChatGPT provide a great way of ‘getting unstuck’ when your creative ideas just aren’t flowing. Just start chatting; tell the AI what you’re stuck with, and they’ll usually guide the conversation to give you ideas.
Help with code problems
How often do you find yourself wasting an hour because a couple of lines of code are misbehaving? It happens to ALL of, but AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude can actually code pretty well too, so paste in your problem and what you’re trying to achieve, and get unstuck!
Take advantage of AI in other areas of your business!
There are sooo many ways we can speed up our day-to-day business activities thanks to AI; whether it’s creating and analysing spreadsheet data, or coming up with ideas and outlining content. I use it for so many things in my website design business and I’d encourage you to start harnessing it as much as you can too.
Learn how to use AI to plan, outline & repurpose strategic content in your business inside my course, The Streamlined Content System ⚡️
Conclusion: Predictions for AI web design
Of course, the thing about AI is it’s constantly evolving and improving, so it’s hard to predict how these tools will look in 6, 12 or 18 months time!
However, as I say, as designers we need to prepared for all sorts of technological advances. They’ve happened before and they’ll happen again, and the best thing we can do is keep educating ourselves, learning, and stay informed about new technologies, so that we can stay ahead and adapt as we need.
