What Are AI Website Builders?
If you have heard of some of the big players in the website world – Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and so on – virtually all of them have some kind of website builder now where you can type in a couple of words and it generates a website for you.
These services often come with very attractive entry prices and thereafter a monthly fee for its upkeep and hosting – which isn’t unreasonable, web designers will charge those too – but I do note that there is a staggering difference between the quality of the service you get between the two options, and the ethics.
Designed, But Not By A Designer’s Eye:
We have all seen the produce of 30 seconds’ hard work by an AI website builder, and none of us ever thought it was a masterpiece. Now, that’s not to say human designers don’t foul it up sometimes too – they definitely do. One needs only to look at eBay or Amazon to see, too, that an eyesore can actually generate a staggering amount of money. So, you may ask yourself – why should you care?
You Don’t Have the Reputation They Do
Well, companies like Amazon and eBay have a strong reputation. The rest of us aren’t so lucky, and so in our design should always be the subtle, but present art of trying to earn the trust of our visitors. A site that looks like a jumble sale will fail to deliver, and this will hurt your business perception. It’s also worth noting that a lot of those older companies were more cutting-edge when they were built decades ago, and what’s really happened is that they’ve just not kept up with web design progress because they didn’t need to – their reputation does the work for them now. We, again, aren’t so lucky – we’re starting today, not back when they did.
The Same as Everyone Else is The Same as Invisible
AI designs are often barebones. You’ll get tired old block-y layouts that don’t have any creative flair – slick animations, optimisation, responsiveness – if they are there, they are bodged, not thought through. AI also won’t cater to your niche. It puts a local pub that wants a blog in the same category as a local journalism site – it’s all a blog, it’s all the same, and the same is what you’ll get.
Paying to Keep What You Should Rightfully Own:
Ownership is a big issue for me and I make several points about it on True North’s homepage. We live in an age where everything is rented and the normalisation seems to have made ownership feel almost devious, tainted with the shock that attends theft. I regard ownership as a natural right, though, and one of the more passionate angles of opposition I take to these distant corporations is that they deny you that. If you build your website in one of those AI builders – like Wix and so on – you don’t just pay for upkeep/maintenance (which is second-rate, too), you’re actually paying them so that you can keep accessing your site. Their business model is essentially a ransom.
I think this is unforgivable.
The Terms Are Fairer with a Web Designer
When you pay a web designer, the terms of the contract are not the same. You own the content on your site always. Because it is built on WordPress, you can just login, copy all your stuff, and paste it somewhere else. If you have cPanel access, or Admin status on the site, you don’t even need the developer to do this, so if you are unlucky enough to get a bad developer you can literally just leave them and go all by yourself. This is a peace of mind that money can’t buy. If a company like Wix raises their prices, they essentially lock you out of what should be your own site.
What becomes of your audience, bloggers? What of your business, merchants? What becomes of you if you disappear? It’ll all be gone to the wind – you can be erased just like that. It’s not something that only political dissidents have to worry about. For anyone who is serious about casting out online to start a business – of any sort – this should be a very profound consideration for you.
Who Are You Going To Call?
People’s perception of websites is changing. What used to be a highly technical, skilled job has been undone for a long time by AI such that almost everyone has heard of at least one company that can “make a professional website in seconds” with a mere prompt. But nobody stops to ask themselves what the catch is with this. I’ve outlined above that the design work is usually rough at best, and the ethical issues around ownership, but if you can get by with a messy site and find yourself more trusting than I am towards big companies, that won’t compel you not to use it.
What about support? When something goes bump in the night, who do you call? AI won’t be there for you. You can’t get it to look over your web shop at 2am because the payment gateway has failed, or a blog where the formatting has broken, and fix it for you. It won’t understand. It won’t even look.
The distinction is this: AI sells a website as a product – a standalone commodity – to people who don’t understand that a website is actually a service.
The Comforting Illusion of Support:
You may be thinking “but they have support teams” and you’d be right, but it’s not a score in their favour. Support with platforms like this is often inefficient, and while the agent you get may be well-meaning, they often do not care about your site – their livelihood doesn’t depend on it, for one thing. But more pressingly, such companies will use a ticket-based system where it is very probably the case they get hundreds of tickets a day, and the same agent rarely replies twice to the same one, meaning you are forever in a situation where the agent never seems to understand you, and sends only dispassionate and often un-tailored (and un-helpful) responses. I don’t believe that’s worth paying for, personally.
I’ve Already Used an AI Website Builder But I Want to Leave
If you have already built your website on one of these close, proprietary platforms, there usually isn’t a very simple way to just move your site. Most of the time the simplest (and perhaps even the only) solution is to get a web designer (like me) to rebuild your site from scratch in something that is open, like WordPress.
A Full-Price Rebuild May Be The Only Way
This will often be treated by the developer (as it is by me, too) as a new build and charged as such, because we are essentially doing all the same work we would if someone else handed us a mock-up/design and asked us to build that. It involves starting from scratch and creating a site in exactly the same way. This is what I mean by the ‘hidden cost’ of using an AI builder, because you have got no further ahead by using one. It wasn’t a shortcut. You didn’t end up owning anything you did, and you still had to pay full price to remedy that, making the AI site rather comparable to renting over a mortgage – it’s dead money.
This is Not a Condemnation, it is an Offer to Help
I do want to add here that this post is not written in scornful judgement. I understand (very well) that the cost of ownership is prohibitively expensive in its own right. I have ideas about why that is that are better suited to a personal blog, though. Alas, if you are desperate for shelter you will rent off a landlord until you can afford a mortgage and I do not condemn you for that. The same is true with using an AI site builder instead of a developer.
Indeed, far from condemning you, I want to help you.
What Can I Do?
The hidden cost of AI website builders is that the business model denies you ownership over what you create. There is the illusion of affordability, but you are bartering money for control, and in the long run you may not even end up saving money. I didn’t even go into how progress is often punitively priced – adding features like analytics or stores raises fees markedly, whereas with a developer it’s a one-off payment for their time setting up and then – again – you own it.
In reality, AI website builders there to create the illusion of progress and foster a captive market for the company. If you are serious about building something enduring, ownership over your creation is not a point for negotiation.
This is why I build on WordPress. Whether it’s a bespoke website through True North, or a more accessible path I’m developing through Anchor, the principle is the same: your site belongs to you. It’s not rented. It’s not conditional. It’s yours. This is a peace of mind I want all of my clients to have.
Reach out to me if you are in need of (or just interested in) my services – I am very happy to help.