Moreover, the industry will be worth 15.7 trillion dollars by the end of the decade. If you think that’s outlandish, just take a look at your smartphone. Whether you like it or not, if you are using a smartphone, you are most probably using Artificial intelligence as well. Actually, around 97% of users interact with AI daily.

So, the question is not whether you should use AI but how to utilize it in your best interest. Is it worth giving a shot when creating a website, and in what aspects can it reduce your work and help you create a stunning online home? In short, let’s discuss how to utilize AI when building your website.

Can AI do everything from A to Z?

Before we get started, however, let’s address the elephant in the room. You might think you can build a website just by telling an AI what to do. Wouldn’t that be something? Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. AIs are not yet smart enough to create such complex things independently. They will need your guidance and your ability to share your vision clearly. The AI will also need refined instructions on how to proceed with some aspects, as it tends to be stubborn in doing things its way or in no way.

What AI can do, however, is help you with the heavy lifting. The manual job, which usually takes days, can now be done in mere seconds.

Searching through the internet, you will find several AI-powered website builders who will promise you a great website in a few minutes only by asking you a few questions. And indeed, these are great if you have absolutely no vision whatsoever of how your website should look. However, at least for now, such platforms build generic websites that lack personality and flair. That’s enough to chase most customers away.

Still, that doesn’t mean you should entirely disregard this marvel of modern technology. On the contrary, you should take full advantage of the AI’s capabilities when building your website.

Use AI in web design

Just a few years ago, this was more like a science fiction than a reality. Today, we can bear the fruit of the tireless development of Artificial intelligence and its strive to take web designers out of business. Jokes aside, AI is far from being able to substitute an experienced web designer, but it can help first-time website owners know precisely what they want. In other words, AI is great at giving you an idea of how your website should look and what elements it should have. To top it all off, it includes complimentary color schemes that perfectly align with your brand.

In this regard, DALL-E can be of great help. Instead of souring for hours across various platforms, searching for something that might be up your niche, you simply write a simple request like, “Create a website design layout for an {industry name} in the {niche name} niche. The website is for {brand name}, and the target audience is {target audience}.” You will receive several versions of great-looking websites.

Uizard is another outstanding AI tool dedicated to creating exceptional web designs. Unlike DALL-E, it creates full-blown mockups like the one below:

Just share what you want to create, add your categories and your needs, and the AI will do the rest. You can also use screenshots or sketches of your design, and Uizard will transform them into mockups you can use for ordering a website to a designer.

Now, as you can see, these AI tools won’t build your website but will help you get a clear idea of what you want and what you have. After that, you can make it yourself on WordPress or hire a designer to do it for you.

However, before that, you will need to work on your brand.

Use AI in building your brand

Now that you have a design in mind, it’s time to improve your branding. First and foremost, you will need a logo. There are many logo generators out there. Those that are free to use are pretty good but will only generate a standard logo. It’s good enough if you are just starting, but hiring a designer for the job might be a better idea if you are dreaming of going big. Otherwise, AI generators like Looka will create a stunning and elegant logo based on several questions and preferences. The entire process takes less than 2 minutes. After that, you can get your logo for a small fee.

Smashing Logo is another great tool in this direction. It creates various types of logos based on your preferences, industry, and niche, as well as your personality. Still, in the end, if you want to get a web-ready logo, you will have to pay a hefty price. Yes, you will have it instantly, but alternatively, it won’t be any cheaper than hiring a designer on Fiverr to create one for you.

There are many more logo generators, but at least for now, they are far inferior to having a designer create your logo. Still, they are handy to give you an idea of what logo to order. However, there is a far more valuable use for AI when it comes to branding. You can use it to find your perfect target audience, determine your buyer persona, and align your brand voice and personality to your target audience’s expectations. This is invaluable for your website creation process, as it’s instrumental to building your brand personality from the very beginning. In this regard, Chat GPT and Bard are irreplaceable partners.

Use AI in creating content

Speaking of Chat GPT and Bard, they can be of great help in creating content for your website. Especially with Google’s Gemini and Open AI’s Chat GPT-4, AI engines are truly on the verge of being able to create stunning copy for your website independently. Unfortunately, though, that’s not even close to enough.

Indeed, AI assistance is of great help, but if you want an honest, genuine connection with your audience, you must write from the heart. Most users can easily recognize AI’s refined and to-the-point style, devoid of any personality. You can’t force a machine to mimic empathy or human emotions, as it can’t understand them. You can’t forge genuine experiences, which, again, AI can’t have.

Still, AI can help you a lot with creating content. On the one hand, AI can inspire some great ideas on how to build your landing page. It will give you the best practices and even provide you with examples.

Furthermore, it will streamline your work by making the research process infinitely easier. A great example is researching your target audience and their characteristics. Instead of reading 20 articles and 30 papers, you can just ask an AI model to summarize all of them and give you direct answers to the relevant questions. Not sure what the relevant questions are? No problem, ask the AI to help with that as well.

Artificial intelligence can work miracles in the background. Still, don’t be greedy and write the actual copy and content yourself. Otherwise, your communication with your audience will remain just that – artificial. And believe it or not, users feel the difference.

Use AI in maintaining a blog

While we are talking about content, AI can help you greatly in writing your blog post. Though it’s pretty tempting to use Chat GPT or Bard to generate blog posts, this is definitely not a good idea. Even if you utilize the paid version of Chat GPT, you will still struggle to provide a unique perspective on an issue. You will simply paraphrase other ideas, which is not the point of having a blog at all. Your blog, along with being a great SEO tool, aims to showcase your professionalism and understanding of the industry you are in. It grants you authority. Thus, using AI to create blogs is disgraceful, to say the least.

Moreover, although Google doesn’t penalize AI content per se, it insists on sharing personal experiences with your audience. As we already discussed, however, AI does not have and will never have personal experiences, as it’s a machine. So, naturally, blog posts written by a well-versed in the industry writer will always be better for your SEO. They will also be better for your communication with customers, as well as for establishing your authority.

This being said, AI does have some excellent implications regarding blogs. First and foremost, as we already mentioned, it’s a great way to gather information faster. Still, if you are using the free modules, be careful, as they don’t always tell the truth. Chat GPT’s free version’s knowledge was cut off in September 2021, while Bard often feels the gaps in its knowledge with interpretations that are not always true.

Still, AI can be extremely useful for finding relevant topics, creating content plans, fast-tracking research, editing and proofreading your draft, and, of course, checking for plagiarism. Even this blog post uses some AI help. Almost all writers nowadays use Grammarly to avoid typos.

Use AI in SEO

You might want to dial down your expectations when using AI for SEO. Though utilizing AI will optimize your workflow and cut your work time in half, you still need to know the basics of SEO research. In other words, once again, AI won’t do your job. It will simply assist you in making it a bit easier and faster.

Before you get to the AI tools, building a good and winning SEO strategy is still your job. Yes, AI can help you with gathering and analyzing data, but the creative work will be left to you (or your team, of course). Still, utilizing AI to find trends within your data is more than a good reason to employ AI in your SEO.

Moreover, robots can also take over keyword research. For example, you can use Semrush’s Keyword Magic tool to help you find the right keywords for your needs. That’s, of course, vastly different than asking Bard to find you 20 keywords for your eCommerce niche at the last moment.

AI can also help you make your text SEO-friendly. There are a ton of guidelines that a writer should follow to create an SEO-optimized text. While most professional content writers know them by heart, most people don’t even know they exist. Thankfully, with AI, you don’t have to read through dozens of pages and try to guess what Google had in mind when writing paragraph 3.

We’ve talked about the Yoast SEO plugin, which uses AI to pinpoint problematic aspects in your texts. You can use this tool to polish your text and make it Google’s favorite.

So, just like with everything else, AI can help you a lot in your SEO efforts, but it will certainly not do the entire job on its own.

Use AI in customer relations

Though it might only play a supporting role in website building and content creation, AI takes the spotlight when it comes to customer relations. Utilizing Artificial intelligence will significantly boost your business in this regard, as AI will practically save you money, time, and effort. The easiest example is customer service.

AI customer support allows even small businesses to offer 24/7 support. What’s more, these AI interactions save you money from hiring an entire support team. Moreover, they effectively take care of over 90% of all queries, as they are most often something that can be found in the FAQ section or elsewhere on your website.

The best part is that the AI can store and analyze data from these interactions and help you position yourself better on the market.

More advanced AI can even make customer recommendations based on their online behavior. For example, if a customer is looking for a vacuum cleaner, the AI can also offer them some filters. Or they can pinpoint the color scheme of products they spend more time looking at and offer them similar products in the same colors. The opportunities are as vast as your imagination.

Use AI in eCommerce

Finally, let’s get to the most practical use of AI on your website – e-commerce. As we’ve already explained in our e-commerce trends for 2024 blog post, AI will be everywhere. It will be the catalyst behind the customer-centric offerings in e-commerce in 2024. It will also empower more and more brands to follow Amazon’s lead in offering personalized related products. The retargeting potential is sky-high when utilizing AI, which can increase your sales significantly.

Moreover, AI can help you create a much more efficient sales process, boosting your productivity, revenues, and customer satisfaction. With artificial intelligence, you can create individual and highly personalized customer journeys based on the user’s behavior. This is significantly better than having one customer journey to fit them all.

For example, if a customer has entered your website through Google by clicking on a blog post, they are in a vastly different stage of their customer journey than those who clicked on a specific ad for a specific product. Thus, their customer journey on your website can’t be the same. With the help of AI, you can segment your audience even further, making the entire sales process much more personalized. Naturally, this will lead to better results.

All of this will decrease your spending and increase your overall revenues. Naturally, you will have to find the best tools to do that. If you are after a customized AI tool, you will have to invest a significant amount in building and teaching it. Still, the investment is well worth it.

Conclusion

As you can see, AI can significantly help when building your website. All you need to do is know how and where to utilize it. Hopefully, you will no longer have illusions that a machine can do the job while you kick back, relax, and take all the profits without lifting a finger. Unfortunately, the Technotronic era, as envisioned by Zbigniew Brzezinski, is not as close as the Polish American political scientist believed. So, you will still have to put in the hours to build up your business.

The first step, as usual, is to secure your infrastructure. Yes, even when creating your website from scratch, you need a solid foundation on which to build it. We’re talking of course about your service. No website can exist without a server hosting all its data. Luckily, this is not something you will have to take care of alone.

All you have to do is take a look at our plans and choose the one that best suits your needs. We at HostArmada pride ourselves on our top-of-the-line cloud-based hosting services. We offer lightning-fast loading time, top-notch security, and something no AI can guarantee (at least for now) – a 99.9% uptime. Remember that no matter how good your website is, it only counts if it’s out there on the internet for others to see. With our hosting services, that’s guaranteed.

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What is AI, and how it has evolved

AI has significantly changed the IT sector in the past few years. Most companies worldwide, especially the software giants, realized that AI is the next big thing. Many believe that the rise of AI will be the 4th industrial revolution.

In practice, Artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to learn and perfect themselves without human interaction. This has been achieved by introducing an IT version of the Darwinian evolution idea, “survival of the fittest,” and infusing it into a computer algorithm. This allows computers and machines to learn from their mistakes and perform better each following time. Something that only a few people can do. Moreover, the learning process is much faster and far easier as the machine basically teaches itself.

Getting to AI was not an easy journey. In fact, IT specialists and scientists have worked hard for more than half a century to get to where we are today. While the idea of artificial intelligence can find its roots in ancient times, it was only in the 1950s that humankind could finally produce such machines capable of independent thought. Naturally, the start was slow, and just like with any great idea, financing was hard at first. Only after 1974, after computers gained much broader recognition as the future of the world, AI research went into overdrive. It took around 50 years and many failures to finally reach the point when AI started working properly.

Some numbers

Today Artificial intelligence is something more than a dream. It’s a reality that’s actually somewhat beneficial. So naturally, about 35% of all companies already use AI, and 42% are looking for ways to implement AI into their business. Moreover, 91.5% of the leading companies worldwide are investing heavily in AI, believing it will lead to at least 25% growth in customer satisfaction. This shows that AI, without a doubt, is here to stay.

Unsurprisingly, its market size has grown to 142.3 billion dollars in 2022 and is estimated to reach 1.85 trillion dollars by 2030. According to PwC, AI will boost the world’s economy to reach 15.7 trillion dollars by 2030, as artificial intelligence will be instrumental for about 26% of it.

Furthermore, according to the World Economic Forum, AI will produce a net increase of 12 million jobs worldwide. Unfortunately, before that happens, an estimated 85 million people will lose their livelihoods, and about 35% of all professions today will be affected by the rise of AI. This puts another ethical factor to the equation, which prons us to discuss the rise of AI even more seriously.

Why the AI discussion is important

Discussing AI in mere numbers is definitely not enough, as there are far too many ethical factors to consider. On paper, AI is an industrial golden age waiting to happen. However, in historical terms, industrial revolutions happen after great social and economic distress. With an ever growing population, snuffing 85 million jobs, even if 97 million jobs will be created in the long run, will create social chaos. Moreover, one of the most intelligent people who ever lived on this planet, Stephen Hawking, warned us that humanity is not ready for AI and that artificial intelligence could be our demise.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should treat AI as taboo. It only means we should take our time and see the benefits and downsides of implementing AI into our world. How will this affect our society, our economy, and our lives?

For now, let’s focus on what we are good at. Let’s see if an AI could help you build a winning website and how you can implement this outstanding technological advancement most efficiently.

AI for web design

Web design and web development as a whole are not excluded from the general AI expansion across industries. On the contrary, this is one niche where AI truly excels. There are a variety of AI engines that can help you create one truly inspiring website without writing a line of code or having any knowledge of design, color schemes, or art. Basically, AI can do it all. But would it be efficient, and how will this affect your website’s performance?

Benefits

At first glance, using AI for creating and maintaining your website can offer you many advantages.

Enhanced UX

Artificial intelligence will immensely improve your website’s user experience. Naturally, this will significantly boost your performance, as 79% of users will abandon your website and search for the same product elsewhere if they don’t like your design. But, more importantly, people simply won’t buy if you haven’t created an easy-to-follow customer journey.

The worst thing about user experience is that all customers have their own expectations. Depending on your niche and product type, they will expect a different layout, information, and a different journey. Naturally, a good web designer can recreate their vision if you give them the data. This is the tricky part. Web designers are not data analysts, and you need to provide them with what you expect from them. Often, designers tasked with creating a user-friendly web design for a certain product recreate their vision of the customer journey on the screen. That, however, is far from optimal, as your customers are a unique set of people, and even if your designer can imagine how they think and what drives them, the decision is still subjective.

This is where AI excels. Artificial intelligence works only objectively. With a good engine, it can gather all the needed information from your current website, gather statistical data from the internet and recreate a design that’s based entirely on data. Naturally, this will enhance your UX immensely.

Increases speed and efficiency

One of the most significant advantages of using an AI web design tool is its unparalleled speed and efficiency. For example, if you need to create a website with unique graphics, pictures, and design, this will take weeks for humans to complete. An AI tool can do that in mere minutes. It will generate layouts, suggest color schemes, and even write the entire code.

Moreover, the AI can streamline the entire quality assurance and testing phases without needing additional personnel and for a fraction of the time. This will make the whole process much faster, and your website’s code will be clean and declogged from the very get-go. This will make your website as fast as your hosting plan allows it to be. Naturally, this will benefit your entire performance and enhance your profits, as the faster your website works, the more people will stay on it for the journey.

Scalability

If you are fresh on the market, you will definitely be looking for designs that can offer scalability. Artificial intelligence tools are designed with this specific aspect in mind. For example, if you have an e-commerce website and your products go viral, you will need the capacity to handle many more users and transactions. Also, you will want to increase your product portfolio. Naturally, this requires some infrastructure which, if made by humans, will take time. Retailers know far too well that customers have money to spare, but they rarely have time to spare.

An AI-powered tool can automatically make the needed changes. It can analyze your user’s behavior, identify patterns, and make suggestions on how to enhance your website design to accommodate your growing customer base.

As you can imagine, this will have a huge impact on your profits, popularity, and authority.

An easy, cost-efficient start

Artificial intelligence-generated web designs are an outstanding solution if you don’t have the funds to hire the professionals needed to create a genuinely good website. For example, if you are new and lack the funds to start big, you might want a simple but good-looking webpage to attract people and convince them to buy your products. In this case, an AI-generated web design will be sufficient. But, more importantly, it will be cost-efficient, as you can have your website operational in under an hour and start selling products immediately.

Downsides

Naturally, using AI-powered web design has its limitations. It’s not something you’d want to disregard, as, in the long run, it can negatively affect your website’s performance. So let’s discuss the downsides of AI in web design in more depth.

Lack of imagination

This is probably the biggest problem of AI-generated web designs. They lack any imagination. AI is devoid of imagination, so it simply can’t think of anything innovative. It can’t push progress, meaning you will only imitate the best practices, albeit originally and uniquely. This might be OK for when you are starting your business. However, in the long run, if you want to become an industry leader or authority figure in your niche, you can’t imitate and follow. You need to lead.

If you become overly dependent on AI-powered web design, your website will be nothing more than a cookie-cutter version of something more imaginative and better.

Lacks understanding of human behavior

While an AI can read and analyze user data perfectly, it will never be able to understand human behavior. This means that it can create one perfectly optimized design for your audience, yet still, no one would visit. That’s because human behavior is not based only on logic but, more often than not, on emotions. So while an AI can predict that people are most actively purchasing a product between 2 and 3 PM, for example, it can’t anticipate in what mood these people are getting into your website, so it can enhance the feeling that pushes them to buy.

Customer behavior is far more reliant on subjective rather than objective factors. Thus it’s practically impossible for an AI to fully grasp why people act as they do. At least not for now.

It’s Overlydependant on data

That’s hardly a downside if you have the data, but still, you can’t put all factors related to decision-making into numbers. If you use your own data, you risk feeding the AI your subjective understanding of your users. For example, many business owners have an ideal buyer persona. So they may push AI to construct the website based on this persona’s needs. Naturally, if their persona is not accurately portrayed, this will lead to a website customized for the wrong audience.

On the other hand, if the AI is gathering data from the internet, it may stumble upon incorrect data, affecting the product’s quality and accuracy. In short, if the data used to train the AI is biased or incomplete, it can produce flawed designs or recommendations.

Privacy issues

Using AI can negatively affect customer perception of your business, as 94% of users expect companies to be fully transparent in their methods and information gathering. The problem with AI is that it’s self-taught, and at some point, no one really knows what exact data it collects. Yes, you can limit the AI from gathering specific types of data. Still, you won’t be able to inform your users precisely what data you are collecting from them. Furthermore, this will be a legal issue if you want to enter the EU market, where they have a GDPR requirement where website owners need to actively ask for consent for gathering any data.

AI for content

Creating content for your website regularly is one of the most challenging aspects of having a business. For your web content to be effective and reach its goals, you must have a vast understanding of how to communicate your ideas through content. AI offers a quick and relatively cheap solution to this problem. However, before you rush into firing your entire content marketing team, you must first understand the benefits and downsides of using AI for your content.

Benefits

Having an AI create your web content has many benefits, and one can hardly argue that AI can make this challenging task much easier and faster. Here are the main advantages of using such tools

Unparalleled speed

The speed at which an AI can provide you with content is simply incomprehensible. No one can generate a text of such quality in such a short time as an AI. Moreover, you guarantee perfect readability, zero grammar or spelling mistakes, and a comprehensive and well-written text. Furthermore, you can teach your AI to create 100% unique texts, which will enhance the quality of your text. All you need to do is write the task in a chatbot such as Chat GPT, and in about 10 seconds, you will get high-quality content for your blog or website.

It helps with writer’s block

Writer’s block is the bane of any content writer. Anyone who stood before the white sheet and had to generate a high-quality text knows the pressure of starting strong and persuasive. An AI tool can definitely help with this. It can create your writing plan, research the topic, or even write it down. However, don’t overtrust the AI generator, as it has some limitations we will discuss in a bit.

It’s highly cost-efficient

If you are new on the market, you probably won’t have the funds to hire professional content writers to take over your content. Though they bring a lot of value in the long run, content writers are generally expensive. So not everyone can afford to pay a couple hundred dollars for SEO-optimized articles. On the other hand, an AI subscription costs around 100 dollars annually. So, for a fresh business, this is a cheap way to generate content and get noticed by the public.

Better targeting

Content differs in many ways depending on the channel, target audience, how far down the sales and marketing funnel they are, and other factors. Usually, when a content writer is given a task, they want to know the purpose of the text. This way, they can use the particular tone and writing style that will best suit the channel and the targeted audience. If you are writing your content without any marketing know-how, your content is probably not optimized for the media you are using. An AI generator will fix that. These bots will use data to determine the most efficient way to write audience-oriented content. They will scrape the internet for the best examples and write unique content. So, this will immensely improve the content’s effect on your audience.

Most importantly, it will retain your brand voice regardless of the tone needed for the channel. That’s one of the most challenging aspects of writing content. One that comes with a lot of practice and understanding of the different media and the audiences that use them.

Downsides

Unfortunately, AI is still not quite there when it comes to writing quality content that can reach particular goals. It’s better than nothing, of course, and it certainly has its benefits. However, the downsides in this case far outweigh the pros.

Lack of character

Regardless of the content at hand, if it’s devoid of character, it won’t be nearly as entertaining as anything written by a human. That’s because writing usually is based on the emotions you infuse into the text. Whether it’s a pure scientific text or a passionate speech, you are trying to relay an emotional idea behind your work. You want to forward your feelings about the project and describe your passion. An AI cannot do that, as it’s devoid of emotions and can’t understand them. That’s why usually AI-generated content is dry and factual. They have no opinion or evaluation of the facts, which is definitely not a characteristic of a leader.

Lacks personal experience

Another fatal flaw of AI-generated content is the lack of personal experiences. It can provide you with much information on almost any topic. Unfortunately, it can’t give you a unique perspective on the task. For example, if you want to represent a product, you may list all its features. However, if you haven’t used it yourself, if you haven’t felt how it handles and what it can do, you won’t be able to persuade anyone to try it out. That’s one of the main reasons people read reviews of the products before buying them. They search for subjective, personal experiences.

Limited research capabilities

Another huge problem of AI-generated content is the limited research capabilities. To be efficient, an AI needs data. However, as a machine, it’s unable to estimate if this data is biased or genuine. Moreover, it will often scrape information from the internet, which introduces plagiarism problems and some questions about the source’s reliability. Most importantly, AI is only as dependable as its training protocol. For example, the most popular free AI tool Chat GPT has constant data training but has its knowledge cutoff in September 2021. So you can imagine how much your industry and customer behavior has changed over the past year and a half.

Devalued content

Arguably the biggest downside of AI-generated content is the fact that Google and other search engines will devalue it. In their most recent helpful content update, Google was adamant that they wouldn’t rank content devoid of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. AI generators arguably can only provide some limited expertise. That’s hardly enough to enjoy the pleasures of being on Google’s first page. So, while it’s better than nothing, AI content will cause more harm than good in the long run.

How to effectively use AI on your website

Despite the negatives, it seems that AI is here to stay. So you might as well use it to your advantage. Naturally, to be most efficient, you must use its benefits while avoiding the downsides.

For starters, if you can afford a web designer or a content writer, at least for now, it’s far better to trust them with your projects. AI-generated websites and content are an acceptable solution if you are just starting your business endeavors. However, using such help will only bring drawbacks if you are already an established brand.

In general, AI tools are a great way to create a frame for your work. It can also help you do some tedious, time-consuming tasks. Still, unfortunately, they are not yet capable of entirely replacing the human touch in website development and content creation.

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