Visual website builders have allowed folks who don't have a lot of time or technical expertise to create sites without code for two decades. AI can make it even easier, allowing you to create a website customized for your brand in minutes.
In this step-by-step guide, I'll show you how to create a website with Durable AI, an artificial intelligence site builder. We'll look at how to generate your site, customize the AI-generated content, create your own content and test everything to ensure your site is fully functional before release.
Durable AI is a website builder that can create a website for you in approximately 5 minutes or less once you've entered some simple information about your business. This is similar to most AI-powered website builders, but Durable AI takes it further in two key ways:
All of Durable AI's auto-generated text is customized to your business and built on basic SEO principles, including local SEO principles. This means the content uses keywords relevant to your business, like "marketing" and "Canada," to help you rank well in search engines. You'll still want to customize it to better represent exactly what you do, but this can be a great starting point.
Durable AI also offers a variety of other AI-powered business tools, including:
These tools make it easy to build and manage an online business. They'll also integrate directly with your Durable-generated website so you'll be able to do everything from one account.
Most generative AI is trained by scraping content from the web, often without permission from -- or compensation for -- the creators. Many folks believe using AI is unethical for this reason and may even distrust brands using AI. There are also potential legal concerns, with multiple ongoing lawsuits against AI companies, including a lawsuit against Stable Diffusion. You can't copyright purely AI-generated content without any human authorship at this time, either.
If you want to avoid these concerns, or you're worried about the enormous amount of power and water AI uses, you can manually create a site using one of the best website builders for small businesses instead. These tools are built for beginners who want to build a site without code, so you don't need to worry about learning web development or complex technical processes to use them.
Start by telling Durable AI the type of business you're building. Be specific, as Durable AI will use this to generate content for your site, and the quality of this content depends on the amount of information it has. For example, if you're a marketing consultant, you might list the type of marketing you specialize in (like "digital marketing" or "social media marketing"). This should give you better results than just saying "marketing".
Next, you'll need to tell Durable AI your business's location and name. These will be used to optimize your auto-generated content for SEO. You can leave the location blank if you're primarily running your business online, but Durable AI recommends against this because local SEO can be a powerful tool for attracting customers.
Once you've submitted your information, Durable AI will generate your site. The whole process typically takes less than 5 minutes and gives you a basic yet attractive website populated with text and images relevant to your business.
Next, you can modify your site's overall layout, color schemes and fonts/typography to better match your vision.
Click the Customize link near the top left corner to view a drop-down menu containing options for editing the overall appearance of your site.
To change the entire layout of your site, click Change Template, then pick a design from the template library. Your content will automatically be mapped to the new template. Or click Regenerate to have Durable AI build a wholly new site.
If you're happy with the layout but want the color scheme to match your brand better, open the Customize menu and click Colors. You can then choose from a range of premade color palettes or create a custom palette to match your brand identity.
Return to the Customize menu and click Fonts. There are several premade font packs you can choose between.
Once you've selected a font pack, click over to the Custom area to change things like font size. You can also switch out your header or body text font here for an even more unique look.
Next, you'll want to create text, images and other content for your website. There are two ways to do this: modifying placeholder content and adding new content. You can also create new pages, which you can then populate with more new content.
Click on any placeholder content to open a sidebar with editing options. If you select your site banner, for example, you'll see options for changing the text and image. You can either manually edit the placeholders or ask Durable AI to create something new by clicking Regenerate.
There are a few modifications you can make to improve your site's effectiveness:
Hold your mouse over any area of the page to see an Add Section option. Clicking on this reveals numerous options, including banners, sections for displaying your services and reviews/testimonial blocks. You can also click Content, which lets you add elements like text, multimedia text/image blocks and FAQ sections.
Select a type of section, and Durable AI will build it for you, complete with text and images created to match your brand information. You can either leave this content in place or modify it using the steps outlined in the previous section.
Click on Pages > Create New at the top of the page to see Durable AI's page templates, then choose the type of page you want to make. Durable AI will generate it for you, including placeholder content, within a few minutes. Alternatively, you can create a blank page and manually add sections.
Depending on your site, your website might include the following pages:
Durable AI has templates for most of these pages, so you can customize the content to match your business.
Pro tip: The menu will display pages in the order you created them. There's no easy way to change this order, so create your pages in the order you want them to appear.
You're almost ready to publish your site! There are just a few things you'll want to do first:
You'll also need to buy a premium Durable AI plan. These plans start at $12 a month (billed annually) for unlimited storage and bandwidth. They also include a domain name and, unlike most other hosting services, the domain is free as long as you maintain your Durable AI subscription instead of only for the first year.
Make sure your site is working the way it's supposed to before you start marketing so that when you do, the visitors who arrive will stick around (and hopefully buy something, too). There are two steps to this process: testing and optimization.
You should test your site in three ways:
Pro tip: Run these tests at least once a year after you've published your site (and any time you're making major changes). This may help you improve your site over time.
There are several ways to optimize your site before you start promoting it:
Keep testing until everyone -- you, your testers and your speed testing tool -- agrees that your site is in tip-top shape. When there are no more errors to catch, you're ready to start promoting your site!
If you're not happy with what you've seen in this tutorial or you can't get your Durable AI site to match your exact vision, consider using a different AI builder. I recommend Squarespace for two reasons:
You'll pay a little bit more -- $16 a month (billed annually) instead of $12 a month -- but the improved design experience makes it well worth the increased cost.
Durable AI's robust website and content generation tools make it easy to create your entire website in under an hour, no code required. You can regenerate every element as many times as you want and manually customize anything you're not happy with -- and there's no code or technical experience required at any stage of this process.
If you wish to make a truly effective website, however, you'll want to follow some best practices. Adding your own images, reviews, testimonials and content showing potential customers how you work goes a long way toward building trust with your visitors. You'll also want to run at least two rounds of tests -- and get feedback from trusted friends or family -- to ensure your website is working the way you want it to before you publish.
