We’ve all heard about AI coming for our jobs; the future is all about AI. And it’s taken a while to see where, how or what direction it might all take. How would AI work with website design? We know you can create a piece of music in just a few seconds or come up with some pretty spellbinding artwork with just a few requests.
I’m also very aware that AI is taking over video production; something like a third of all YouTube videos are now AI, I’d hate to guess what that number is on TikTok. AI is ubiquitous and everywhere at the same time.
However, it has taken a while to see how it would truly affect Website Design. It can make the content, but can it make the websites that house the content? I’ve also been watching the likes of Claude, who everyone has been telling me writes the code, but so far, even that has just been snippets or problem-solving pieces of the bigger puzzle.
More than just Websites
To look at this issue properly, we’ve got to change mindsets, websites are no longer websites – they need to be Apps – things that do things – for websites to work in the AI world, they need to solve problems. Looking pretty with a few photos and strap lines is not a good use of AI.
Instead, think about clients’ needs, efficiencies, staff tools, portals, processes, and other tools. These are all things that can be handled within a so-called traditional website. Buying tickets, products, subscriptions, managing safeguarding, GDPR, and analytics.
If you start to think of your website from these angles, you can start to see what AI might produce for you. If you can think it you can create it.
Most AI tools will build you a website these days, but it’s in the prompting that the key lies, you have to ask it the right thing, and it will produce what you need. This is a skill that needs to be acquired.
Lovable.dev
We’ve seen it now, Lovable.dev, Emergent.sh or Base44, will literally make any of the above via a chat prompt; they will connect your domain name, host websites, create websites, respond to any design decision and deal with any level of complexity you can throw at it. They connect to payment providers, build product data sets, link everything together, and write as many blog posts on any subject, all in a matter of seconds.
This, quite possibly, is the future of website design, being no longer platform dependent or needing to worry about word structure. Like all new technologies, there is a certain fear factor; people went from having to get business cards and letterhead printed professionally to having a printer in their bedroom. Businesses have gone from letter-writing to email, to WhatsApp and now to prompt.
Prompts actually get stuff done. ChatGPT offers a world of practical advice, examples, and we’ve also heard a lot about Agents, who may book your plane tickets for you. But when it comes to website building and management, we’re seeing a whole new ball game.
One interesting caveat, we have noticed with Prompt-based website design is that the AI doesn’t care, it pulls in code bases that it needs from anywhere, no longer is our website built on a platform like WordPress, AI uses what it can get its hands on. Snippets of Node.js, React, jQuery, WordPress, Liquid, it does not matter, if it solves the issue and does the job, AI will use it. AI does not care how it gets to the endgame, it just cares that it gets there.
Developers are right to be worried for their jobs, AI can write the code, learn the code and build new code.
What’s Left
Where does this leave us? In more or less the same place, we’re the ‘prompters’. Our job is to guide and prompt Ai into a sensible problem-solving direction.
It’s always been the mission – the Internet is designed to enable ordinary people to solve the problems they are facing, whether medical, mechanical, at home or in the office. Sales-based or Knowledge-based. What is going to be interesting about the involvement in AI in Web Design’s future is whether it will swing away from e-commerce and back to a more problem solving how to place that was first envisaged by Tim Berners-Lee.
And by the way, Tim Berners-Lee has himself often declared his disappointment with the direction of the Internet. Maybe with a plagiarism AI ecosystem, we will see the shift Tim Berners-Lee wants to see.
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