You’ve probably become familiar with terms like automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). When you first heard about these technological advancements, they may have seemed like intriguing but far-off concepts that had little to no impact on your daily life.
Well, those days are over. Automation, machine learning, and AI are here now, impacting the world around us, as Kara Swisher wrote for Vox.
These advancements are having a particularly big impact in the web-design space. In this post, we’ll discuss AI and web design — notably, how you can leverage AI web-design tools to improve your website.
Understanding AI for web design
In the most basic sense, a web design generated by AI replaces the roles of the designer and developer with an advanced software program that’s able to process human-generated inputs into a final web design.
The interface can take the form of a chatbot. You provide inputs such as color scheme, font choice, and overall taste for what the site should look like, and then the AI program delivers a fully formed landing page or website.
The benefits are clear: AI web design simplifies the design process in terms of the time and resources necessary to build a website, or to test out different versions of a site, which will naturally cost less. This allows you to focus more on your vision and story, not just your budget, when designing your website.
Consider how difficult (and expensive) it would be to generate three different versions of your website. Perhaps you want to test different uses of the hero area, or maybe you want to see how different font choices impact the site’s overall look and feel. You’d either have to code them all yourself, pay a designer to do it, or spend the time to tweak existing themes.
But by using an AI program, you could whip up three different sites quickly to compare them and decide. That kind of decision-making power will undoubtedly help you make better, more informed choices about how your final website should look.
There are still downsides to using AI for web design, of course. This is still an emerging technology, so the interfaces have kinks to be worked out. Plus, the sophistication of AI-designed websites can be lacking, especially for site owners who have more advanced functionality needs. (For example, you should make sure that the AI-generated design is mobile responsive, as all WordPress.com themes are.)
Improving your site with AI and web design
Although the software program may be the one generating the website output, it had to have been programmed by humans initially. And that means that more than three decades of web-design experience and best practices are baked into the programming of AI web design programs. That’s significant.
For example, years of testing and refinement have taught us what makes a landing page successful in converting visitors into subscribers and customers. Most of this wisdom is baked into the web design AI, so that the final product is a landing page that incorporates your preferences and desires into an overall framework that’s been proven to convert.
Still, it’s important to remember that even the most sophisticated current AI programs are not effective at making all design decisions. For instance, most web design AIs know to pass off specific tasks that are still best done by humans (e.g. image-processing).
AI can already affect more than just the layout or visual design. Web-design AI can help you structure your content better in the eyes of search engines, which leads to improved SEO. Moreover, spam filters have been using a version of AI for years — Akismet, for example, has been using AI to produce WordPress.com comment sections that are junk-free and useful to readers.
Explore and experiment
Web design AI technology will only continue evolving and improving, which is why it’s so important to be open to it. Even if you don’t need a full-scale redesign right now, you can easily test out different color schemes or font combinations just to see what tweaks might help your current design. And when you do need to change the look and feel of your website, combining the expertise of a human designer with the interactive efficiency of web design AI will help you create the best website possible.
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