6 AI assistants for your website design process

Creating a website from scratch is time-consuming, especially if you have little to no experience with design and coding. For many new startups, hiring someone to build your brand site from nothing may not be financially feasible. 

This situation presents a problem because businesses need functional, eye-catching websites to thrive in today’s digital landscape. For context, over 46% of people say a site’s design is the first thing they look at when deciding if an online store is credible.  

So, what’s the solution? 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded in popularity over the last few years, especially since the release of tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney. These programs use machine learning and natural language processing to help users create images, text, and more. 

Big names in tech have seized the moment and developed helpful AI tools to help veteran designers and newbies alike find success.

Today, we will explore the benefits of using AI for site design. After we review the basics, we will show you six AI assistants you can use to improve your design process. 

Why use AI for website design? 

Let’s start by answering the big question on everyone’s mind, “Why use AI for website design?” 

AI has a long list of advantages that can help you at all stages of the design process. Here are a few noteworthy benefits: 

• Save time – AI can handle repetitive tasks and, more recently, creative assignments. Content marketers who use AI when brainstorming for their blogs and social media posts will shave hours off their weekly workload.

• Break creative paralysis – We’ve all experienced creative paralysis and stared at a blank page for longer than we would like to admit. AI can help you break your block and move your website forward. 

• Create consistent marketing  –  Many AI tools allow you to choose specifications for typography, spacing, and other design aspects. As a result, the marketing material you create for your audience will stay consistent across the board, which is great for boosting brand awareness and building trust. 

• Affordable – Instead of paying a team of developers to create a website from the ground up, you can pay a flat rate for an AI site builder and use it to build your brand. 

• Scaling options –  Scaling up your business can seem daunting if you don’t know where to begin. AI tools can simplify this process by allowing you to scale large projects based on your needs. 

• Improve SEO  –  Some search engine optimization tools now use AI to help business owners quickly and easily find relevant keywords.  

• Uncover data insights  –  most designers don’t have time to review thousands of customer feedback forms. AI can sift through this data in seconds and help you identify patterns, so you have more time to work on designing your website with actionable information at your fingertips. 

As you can see, there are plenty of amazing benefits for AI designers and business owners who know how to harness the power of AI.

Let’s look at some AI tools you can use to get started! 

Top 6 AI assistants for your website design process

Here are six AI assistants that can help you build out your website and populate it with solid content to keep your customers coming back. 

1. ColorMind

The first AI design tool on our list is ColorMind. ColorMind allows business owners and developers to instantly generate a color palette based on their input and preferences. 

One of the hardest parts of starting a website is choosing the initial theme, color palette, and block placement. ColorMind can help ease this burden by analyzing millions of color combinations and helping you discover complementary colors, monochromatic hues, and much more. 

It’s also worth mentioning that you can upload your own image to ColorMind, and it will generate a palette based on the prominent colors in the photo. This feature is extremely helpful for businesses that already have imagery around their brand but need help choosing related colors for their site. 

Colormind is free to use, which makes it extremely helpful for designers on a budget. Once you choose a color palette, you can copy and apply the color values to your website.

2. ChatGPT prompts

ChatGPT is perhaps the most popular tool on our list. It launched in November of 2022, and after a few minutes of use, you’ll find out why it’s become so successful. 

This tool uses natural language processing to allow people to have human-like conversations with the AI-powered program. There are plenty of practical ways to use ChatGPT to improve your website design process. 

One notable benefit is it can dramatically speed up the rate that you produce new content. ChatGPT can help designers brainstorm content ideas, write articles, improve existing articles, and more.

Why is this important? Consider this; 60% of marketers say producing content improves brand loyalty and lead generation efforts. Well-designed websites have engaging blog posts, videos, and infographics that keep people coming back for more.  

This powerful AI assistant can help you improve your website beyond traditional content creation. 

Here are a few ways to use ChatGPT prompts to improve the design of your online store:

• Generate ideas for new pages and layouts based on your specifications
• Provide actionable advice on coding practices and programming languages
• Get feedback on existing pages  –  give it a URL and ask how to improve the design and accessibility for a better user experience
• Troubleshooting  –  ChatGPT can help you improve loading times, find broken links, and identify poor design choices
• Analyze analytics and surveys  –  this will help you make design choices based on the needs of your audience

The best part is ChatGPT is free to use. There’s a premium option available for $20 a month, but the free version is still very effective. The only thing you’ll need to keep an eye out for is that the servers can get overwhelmed if too many people use the tool at once. 

3. NightCafe

Next, let’s talk about AI art. Virtually all of us have encountered AI art at one point or another over the past year. YouTubers, social media personalities, and business owners use AI art programs to create eye-catching content and improve the design of their websites.

For this list, we chose NightCafe. The interesting thing about this tool is that it allows users to use different algorithms to put together art based on their prompts. NightCafe uses Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, CLIP-Guided Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP, and Neural Style Transfer to enable people like you to create stunning artwork in seconds.

Aside from the text prompts, users can also upload photos they’ve saved and ask the program to create AI variants of the original piece. This feature can lead to exciting possibilities, especially if you own the original work. 

NightCafe is extremely powerful and comes with a wide range of social features. Users can join communities, participate in daily generative contests, and invite their friends or co-workers to create AI art, all from the same page. 

This tool is free to use as long as you don’t mind creating images one at a time. If you want to create four or more images at once so you can quickly find the right art for your site, credits are available. Users can earn credits by joining their newsletter, inviting friends, or engaging with the brand on social media. You even get five free credits for logging in each day! 

If you’re interested in buying credits, that’s an option too. You can buy between 100 credits ($5.99) and 1,400 credits ($49.99). There are also several mid-level options available. 

4. GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is an excellent tool for programmers who want an AI tool to help streamline their coding and design process. Anyone who has worked with code knows it can get extremely repetitive and take up a lot of time. 

Instead of writing line-by-line code, GitHub Copilot shows suggestions based on your input, specifications, and the coding language you’re using. This seemingly small feature can have a tremendous impact on your productivity. According to their website, 88% of users report feeling more productive, and a whopping 96% of users say they have an easier time creating repetitive code. 

One of the standouts of this tool is it integrates well with many of your favorite code editors. Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Visual Studio Code are all compatible. This feature ensures you’ll still get value from the tool, even if you need to switch to a different language or code editor. 

GitHub Copilot has a free trial, but you need to buy a subscription if you want to continue using it. The business plan is $19.99 and could be a worthwhile investment if you find yourself spending too much time coding and not enough time on other design aspects of your website. 

5. Bookmark

Bookmark is the fifth AI tool on our list. At face value, Bookmark is a website builder that allows business owners to quickly and easily create a website with their drag-and-drop builder. 

But if you look a little closer, you’ll see that Bookmark also has an AI feature that can help you build a framework for your website in about two minutes. They call this part of their site AiDA, which stands for artificial intelligence design assistant.

Once you install Bookmark, all you have to do is answer a few questions about your website, and the AI will get to work based on your suggestions. 

You’ll save a ton of time and eliminate many of the smaller pain points designers experience when creating a website from scratch. Bookmark will even develop variations of your site so you can choose the one that matches your vision. 

After the initial setup, Bookmark will continue to offer suggestions based on your specific goals, traffic, and user interactions. You can apply the changes with one click and see your new design instantly. 

The cost is reasonable when you consider the peace of mind this tool brings to the table. Professional plans start at $14.99, while business plans are $24.99 monthly. You can get a discount if you choose an annual subscription. 

6. Zyro

Zyro is the final tool on our list. Much like BookMark, it is also a drag-and-drop website builder. The thing that makes Zyro stand out from the crowd is it comes with a long list of AI tools that you can use to design your website. 

Some of the noteworthy features include: 

• AI heatmap  –  see where visitors are spending time on your site. Adjust your design so calls-to-action and other important content are in places where people are more likely to see it. 
• Logo maker  –  Need help designing a logo for your business? This AI tool can help you quickly and easily create an eye-catching logo. 
• Image enhancer/resizer  –  Never compromise on your vision because an image isn’t the right size. Zyro’s image enhancer and resizer will help you optimize images across your website. 
• Content/title generators  –  Cut down on brainstorming and writing time with these handy content marketing tools.

There are other tools worth checking out on their website. The plans are affordable at $11.99 monthly for professional accounts and $14.99 for business accounts. 

It’s time to use AI for web design!

It’s easy to see that AI can have a massive impact on web design. You should know that none of these programs are foolproof. Before adding it to your website, you must carefully examine AI output for consistency and accuracy. 

However, there’s no question that it takes far less time and effort to design a website with the addition of these handy tools. 

I recommend experimenting with the six tools mentioned. You should also explore other options, because AI-powered tech is growing and improving at an almost shocking rate. Over the next several years, we will see a majority of business owners, and developers lean on AI when creating content, designing their websites, coding, improving branding, and optimizing images.