One of the biggest delays [and costs] encounted when building a brand new site is the home page design. As a web developer more focused upon how it works, my response over the years has been to have clients look at other working sites or one of the millions of ‘templates’ around which becomes my visual guide. Often where branding is critical, we’ve simply subcontracted the visuals to a graphic designer who these days often use Canva, for us to then turn into a custom page layout. We then add in required webforms, shopping cart, SEO, booking, members and/or email marketing tools etc.

Where budgets are tight, a logo is often a good place to start, pre-determining site colours and fonts to use. The DesignCrowd service is perfect for this. For pre-built page layouts, Astra have over 250 templates and KadenceWP is another great provider I like. We’ve built hundreds of stunning sites this way, saving time and costs. But now, there’s another even faster and lower cost option. AI.

This tool could fast-track that initial, annoying visual design phase, saving time and costs. Allow us all to get to that first draft, within minutes! Here’s a great intro from a fellow developer we follow from the UK. Aside from the core site domain, hosting, WordPress build and security setups, the cost for this AI-generated site design is very modest. From just USD$79. In fact looking at overall costs, tools like this could open up new business startup and eCommerce markets, largely replacing the need to consider services like shopify.

Once your core website is up and running, there are dozens of AI tools that help with content writing for improved engagement, traffic and sales. The more cost-effective ones we like include Perplexity, Contentbot, PolterAi and Rankmath.

If you need help to get it all started, contact us below, no obligation.