Thinking about major facelist/redesign for my business website - before I dive in with existing toolset (page editor on top of WordPress), I’m gotta check in - what’s happening with AI tools for website creation?
I’m not talking about AI add-ons to classics like SquareSpace, WIX, or other vibe-coding-ish tools, or add-ons to WordPress, but the whole-cloth new stuff.
A brief search and tools like lovable, framer, and others are showing up.
Worth a serious look, or too much bleeding-edge risk?
I’ve seen examples of Framer being using in professional services, I don’t have direct experience with the tool but I guess it’s solid.
have you tried loveable.dev
Might give one or two a try, but hoping for first-hand recommendations to narrow down the choices.
Hi. Professional website developer here. I have tried both Lovable and Framer. They stink. From my perspective, the AI tools are hard to use, and the results they produce are worse than your average WordPress template.
How do they compare to non-pro tools like Squarespace, WIX, and similar?
That’s the angle I’m looking at.
Currently have a WordPress site that a “pro” created for me and it uses a plug-in page system called “Divi” that I absolutely can’t stand so I don’t do any changes myself.
Have used Squarespace in the past and it was too limited.
Not sure if i will change anything now, but was hoping a ground-up new tool, with or without AI, might be progress from the Squarespace era of self-design tools?
I think out of everything you’ve mentioned, Squarespace is far and away the best tool. Wix is a garbage producer.
I think the design tools make worse crap than Squarespace. I wouldn’t even use them for ideation. I don’t think they’re actually there to solve a problem, and I think you’d be better using a WordPress template that doesn’t rely on something like Divi or Elementor. Just stock WordPress.
Depending on your needs, I might consider something like Ghost before I stick with WordPress too.
But this is for your business, right? If your business generates income from its website, get a professional to do it. AI will not cut it, and the breathless marketing around these tools is frankly insane to me. (Doesn’t have to be me; I’m not pitching you. I’m just telling you what I think is going to get you a better return.)
Sorry. I’ll add a little more context. The problem with the AI tools is not that they produce crap, but that it’s they produce extremely bloated code, and the quality of the site is directly relevant to the prompt. With something like Lovable, updating your prompt means the website rebuilds, and that all takes time too. They’re not very fast, and what they make just isn’t interesting.
Like, it wouldn’t stand out to me as adding any real value beyond “speed of development,” which is good for you, but not actually helpful for your business if you need to communicate.
I just asked Lovable to spin up a website for a client I’m working on a redesign for. I pointed it to the original URL, and asked to it to modernize the site. It created something pretty garish, with stock photos everywhere, Liquid Glass-style white text on white boxes with white shadows on top of those stock photos, white buttons with white text (couldn’t make that up), etc. It fails at every contrast test.
The “Contact” section on the bottom of the home page includes a contact form, a meaningless location bar without an address (?!?!?), made up information about response times, an email that breaks the page layout entirely, another call to action for calling instead of using the contact form (it’s unreadable because the text is black and the background is dark blue), a list of training benefits, and another call to action to go to the Contact page.
Here’s an example:
This is in the footer:
And this is the hero image:
Everything animates when you hover over it, including tons of the text and other non-interactive content. I also asked Lovable to “preserve the existing copy,” and it says it did, but it shoved it in the middle of all its AI-generated crap, and has completely removed the name of the business from the hero.
This is not good and not ready for production, and I think anybody trying to sell a different narrative drastically misunderstands the job.
Edit: there are many more examples of I could share of terrible contrast and design choices, but they reveal my client, and I don’t want to implicate them in this nonsense.
Probably OT for this area, but I’m primarily interested in the blog/article posting part of the website being self-service.
The rest isn’t that big and I don’t mind letting a designer do it.
I started with Squarespace and the design part (self-service) was a mess and the blog features were limited, so I hired a company to redesign and they moved it to WordPress.
I found (maybe it has changed?) the basic WordPress sans plugins block editing of posts to be very bad too?
Maybe a different page/blog editor plugin but stay with WordPress?
(I do like the richness of plugins for other things available in WordPress and the ability to have others do the basic security/hosting management side of things.)
I mean, you have options here. If you want just the blog to be editable, and the rest is entirely static, you could have a front-end designer build out the whole thing as a static site, save the blog. Then the blog could be anything you want. If you wanted Markdown, great.
If that were the case, you could use easier-to-use CMS options like Kirby if you wanted to, or any of the site generators like Jekyll or Eleventy if you wanted to go that route. The world would basically be your oyster.
But you’d have to call the designer if you needed somebody to edit the other pages.
You’ve identified a big reason people pay for expensive designers, though: they want an easier-to-use tool than WordPress, and they’ll pay for somebody who specializes in the right tool for them. But it is all pretty person-specific and feature-specific, so there’s no one-size-fits-all option.
