Call me an AI sceptic, if you want. It's not that I don't think AI tools are neat, or useful, or powerful. But I find it annoying that every second person on LinkedIn is suddenly an "AI Consultant" because they write blog posts on how to use Notion.

While I've used AI tools to generate images, write copy, do research, help me choose technologies and try to organize my finances, my experience of all of them could be summed up by saying:

So close, and yet so far...

Basic research and summaries? Fantastic. Example images, bulk graphics, filler blog content - all good. But when it comes to creative outputs, I often feel that AI will sometimes get you 90% of the way there - with only a few finishing touches left to meaty humans. But in most cases it misses the mark so widely you end up huffing and saying, "ok well I'll just do it myself then."

So what about building a website? Can it do that? For the purposes of this article I played around with three popular "AI Website Builders":

• Canva
• Wix
• Wordpress with Elementor Pro

Before I tell you why even the most expensive one sucked out loud, I'll answer the titular question with my favourite catch-phrase: "it depends".

Depends on what?

Can you code? Because it depends on that.

Regardless of the task assigned to them or how specifically tweaked any particular AI is, the AIs we have today work in generalities. They approximate and guess and learn. When you're writing an email or a blog post, this iterative re-trying usually produces something that's good enough for a human to take it, put a bit of polish on it, and send it off.

And for some websites, that's enough. If you need a simple brochure site with some pictures, graphics, copy, even a checkout, then an AI can do that for you nice and easy. However, if you need anything that's more than that, an AI is going to struggle. A lot. You'll need someone who understands the code to come in and fix up the bits the AI couldn't get right.

And this kind of brings me to my point. Let me illustrate with a simple example:

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Hypothetical "Nail Art" Website

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Why nail art? Cos my daughter was looking at some earlier. Let's imagine two very similar websites that sell nail art products, but with a subtle difference:

1. A website that sells a range of decals, polishes and equipment that you can order online
2. A website that lets you submit your own artwork to be turned into nail art decals, which are then sent to a print-on-demand service which ships the finished product to you

Now, number 1 is a straightforward job. Just about any off-the-shelf CMS can do this. Shopify, Wix, WordPress, whatever - pick your favourite. In fact, all of these will also offer you some kind of AI-assisted tool that promises to generate your entire website in a matter of minutes!

So you click the button and lo and behold, there's a website. Except...

• The messaging is a bit off, so you'll have re-write that, on all the pages
• The images look very much AI-generated, gotta put up your own ones when you have time...
• while the checkout pages are set up, they're not connected to any payment processor. You'll have to do that manually,
• You'll need to replace the AI's product shots, descriptions, pricing, sizing and colour options, etc.

You get the idea.

And while all of this can be done by AI on a piece-by-piece basis, that is very much my point:

In most cases, building a simple website is still best done with a CMS, a decent template, and these things we had before AI called 'skills'. The one the AI makes for you might be a good starting point, but it also may make more work for you than just picking a template and populating it with content.

Case number 2 is definitely more complicated, but not beyond the reach of someone with a decent website builder, some plugins, and the ability to google.

However, if you were to ask an AI to do this for you, you'd most likely get a version of a website that would suit use case 1, but not have the richness of functionality you're looking for. You'll still need to source or build the functionality to submit/design your own art, and find a suitable Print-on-demand service that plugs into your site and can fulfil your orders.

So in this case yes you can tell an AI to make you the basics of a site, and then plug in the additional functionality. But to me this just feels like building a template site with extra steps.

So what is AI good for then?

I'm not going to try and tell you that AI isn't useful for building a website, but I'd like to circle back to my catchphrase, "it depends": can you code?

Because if you can, AI can be a huge time saver if you know what code you want to write, but writing it is tedious, time consuming, and would require you to google a bunch of stuff. Here are a few great use cases/prompts I've used before that saved loads of time and effort:

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• Look at a web page and generate a stylesheet or some custom CSS that changes the font family, colour and size to make them the same as the stylesheet on a different website
• Go through this page and write a piece of code that gives each button on the page a unique ID
• Create a full-width 2-column layout with 15% margin on both sides, 20px margin around the two central columns
• Tag the buttons on this page with unique custom events to be sent to google analytics

Now the reason I asked, "can you code?" is this: if the AI writes you garbage, you need to know. If you can't look at a piece of code an AI has generated for you and know why it's not working, then you either need to find someone who knows how to fix it, find a plugin/package/app that'll do the job for you.

Otherwise the AI-assisted code generation approach is no different from googling the problem, copying some code from StackOverflow, and changing bits of it until you eventually give up and restore a backup.

The Verdict (for now...)

AI sucks and I hate it.

Not really. But like any other emerging, first-or-second-generation technology that is much hyped, its use cases are mostly hypothetical or superficial unless you're up to the eyeballs in the latest (paid) tools. And at the moment, AI rewards those who know its limitations better than its capabilities.

If you approach a website build with the idea that, "hey maybe an AI could do this?" then the answer is that it probably can't - or it can't do a better job than you could do by picking a template and beating your head against a CMS for a week or two.

But if you are familiar with an array of AI tools, and use them judiciously and sparingly, when you already know the kind of output you can expect, you can save a lot of time that you'd otherwise spend doing things the old fashioned way.

Did an AI fail to magically build you a website? We can help with that. We build great websites, quickly and affordably, on any platform you like ;) Just tell us about your project and we'll send back a quote.