AI Website Builders vs. Custom Web Design: What Should Businesses Choose?
AI is taking over the technology race, influencing every sector of service, and helping users make the best out of it. When it comes to marketing services, AI website builder tools act as a helping hand with brainstorming, planning, implementing the ideas, making iterations big or small, and even creating a full-fledged website. Yes, you read that right! One of the major advantages of technology is that it has enabled to generate the complete ideas of a website right from the start, with every feature, button, and dropdown in its place.
But does this mean that custom web designs are becoming obsolete? Will there be job displacements and a full switch to an AI website for efficient, quick, and accurate website outputs? This blog helps you weigh both types of web development and make an effective decision for your business requirements.
Understanding AI Website Builders
AI website builders are tools that assist business owners with quick, full-fledged, and innovative websites in a short span of time. Developers often switch to this tool for its simplicity and ease of use. One of the prime features of this tool is its drag-and-drop functionality that guides users to design and develop their website with basic knowledge and understanding. In short, this tool takes care of everything starting from website development to maintenance, saving organizations time and money invested in a manual development process.
Key Features of AI Website Builders
AI website builders are known for their exquisite features that make their operations and outputs advanced. Some such features are:
Drag and Drop Interface
AI always looks forward to fostering your creativity and never runs out of ideas, even when you do. It comes with a well-structured set of drag-and-drop interfaces that keep the design and development moving smoothly. There are plenty of such AI website builders that help you choose the minutest elements of your web pages, such as the font colors, font size, and other details. You can easily mix and match different elements and give life to your website.
Pre-Designed Templates
AI analyzes your requirements and generates ideas and templates based on the pre-existent data. However, unlike human designers and developers, it doesn’t have a pre-designed set from which you can pick and choose based on your requirements. Instead, it asks you all your requirements, business information, your business goals, and audience, based on which it generates templates that you are free to download and use.
Immediate Suggestions
One reason why many designers have already shifted to AI website builders is that they readily give suggestions, instructions, and recommendations to make your website look professional and almost perfect. Be it in the case of the text size, color, template used, contents added, or even image quality, the issues with your website and webpages are readily identified, examined, and addressed. This way, you get a much concise and well-developed website with all the details you want to be included.
Multilingual Assistance
One of the most time-consuming yet essential features that web designers work on is the multilingual assistance. This makes it easy and effective for users worldwide to access the information they are seeking. In addition, AI website builders help in the conversion or translation of certain pages or certain information on the pages to be translated into the user’s native language. Some platforms specifically need multilingual assistance, where the users can quickly read and decipher the information without any external translation help.
Pre-Launch Sharing
Usually, developers get frustrated when the client returns with a set of changes after the website delivery. But with AI website builders, there is a third source that helps in finding errors, corrections, and mismatches in the design and layout. This helps you stay confident about the website or the custom software development trends that you are delivering, and improve it proactively to give it a better look.
Mobile-Friendly Development
AI website builders are the best platforms that help you deliver mobile-friendly designs by resizing the images while maintaining their quality. Again, this feature helps the developers add images to each mobile screen in real-time, understand the errors, correct them, and create a better version. It similarly allows an image resizing feature that helps to enlarge or shrink an image without making it lose the original’s quality. Most importantly, it provides a preview of how the website would look as a mobile version so that the developers can immediately implement the changes if needed.
Types of Website Builders
There are different types of website builders that instantly meet and match different business requirements. Here are some of the different types you should know:
Design website builders
Just like how it sounds, design website builders are mainly website tools that aim to improve the aesthetic or look and feel of the website. This tool is accompanied by a set of layouts and formats that befits each industry and is best to each industry. It also comes with a common color theme, which is preferred by the majority of users who belong to the specific industry. These tools are ideal for inexperienced designers who wish to build an aesthetically pleasing website or webpage.
Content-driven builders
Content is the king of every website. A website or even a web page with no content would look like an empty website. That’s where content-driven builders come to help. These aren’t the real ‘content’ providers, which is something that needs to be done by content creators with ample years of experience and expertise. These tools are used to add text in the appropriate places on the web page. They predict and provide the apt placeholder text that fits in the space of a given website and deliver it in the aptest context.
E-commerce builders
E-commerce is one of the main platforms that derive the best out of AI website builders. It helps in structuring and shaping businesses depending on their industries. It overviews the developer requirements and offers reviews and suggestions for the product pages and pricing methodologies and configures the interactivity of chatbots with customers. These builders improve and accelerate the interactions between the customers and the websites.
Code-based builders
Not all customers approach their providers with simple website development needs. Some of them consist of complex functionalities and take more time than expected. For websites that come with such unique features, code-based builders are the finest choice. These features help developers in creating boilerplate code, making the features live within half the time that it is manually. Thus, custom web development requirements can get the best out of code-based builders.
AI Website Builders vs Custom Web Design: Which Weighs More
While the world is switching to AI website builders for their web development purposes, a minority still prefers to have custom web design. Yet, which would weigh more? Here’s the answer:
Pros and Cons of AI Website Builders
AI website builders are one of the latest advantages of technologies. Yet, it comes with its advantages and disadvantages. Here are some of them:
Pros
The top benefits of using an AI website builder are as follows:
Easy to Launch
AI often looks like many brains and hands put together to work on an immediate requirement. Thus, AI website builders make the website easy to launch. All you need to do is explain the overall website requirements, the specifications, contents, and the page count specifications, if any. Accordingly, the AI website builder delivers a full-fledged website for you, which is easy to launch. For instance, if you are a small business owner and have a tight deadline to launch your website, you can always approach the AI website builder to convert your ideas into results.
Affordable
You need not spend half the amount of money that you do for manual development and UI/UX designing when it comes to AI. It is the technology that works for your needs and automates your requirements. But organizations always have consistent development requirements, iterations, and replacements. AI website builders have come up with an amiable solution for this, too, by introducing subscriptions in different durations: weekly, monthly, and annual. The developers and designers may choose and use their subscriptions based on their needs.
Simple
Let’s not think about AI website builders and instead take any other AI platforms. Let’s say ChatGPT or Gemini. Aren’t they some of the best AI communication platforms that have made interaction simple and quick enough to bring out immediate results? Undoubtedly, yes. This is the same with AI website builders. They need neither you to generate codes nor separate interfaces. It is all auto-generated, provided you use the tool in the right manner. This is why such tools are gaining popularity amongst non-technical users as well.
Inbuilt Features
Almost every AI website builder and developers come with their inbuilt features to meet the changing user requirements. Some such popular features incorporated in website builders are mobile optimization, SEO analysis, and analytics that help you save time and money in making and saving changes that you often create in a website.
Cons
AI website builders could be much ahead of technology, but have some restrictions, such as:
Limited Customization
Yes, AI is a user-friendly technology, no doubt. But it cannot meet the specifications and smallest, highly specific changes the customer would want immediately. It might take longer for the technology to completely understand the changes mentioned and implement them, as it has comparatively less background knowledge about a client than a web designer can have.
General Results
For every query and search, AI has a pre-researched output to show, which is general. Hence, for almost all the users who insert the same query, the output seems to be almost the same. This means that the search results or the outputs you’ve got may seem copied or similar to some of your competitors.
No Growth Assurance
Not just for design and development, this goes for every AI service you use. The usage of AI web design and layouts means that your website may face growth limitations because the full potential of the developers and designers hasn’t been fully utilized. With bigger or more complicated needs coming in the future, which involve new technologies that AI is unaware of, the developers would need to put in manual efforts to
learn the technologies and gain expertise in them.
How to Choose Between AI Website Builders vs Custom Website Design
As you now know what AI website builders and custom website design are, it's time to make a choice. But making a long-term choice blindly is still risky. Here are some of the parameters that help you choose between the two:
Evaluate Your Budget
Before choosing between AI website builders and custom web design, keep your budget in mind. If you can find a web developer within your budget, go for it; otherwise, choose custom web design. Finding someone within your budget isn’t a tough decision if you have already started your research and have thought about the best options you’ve got at hand. Gradually, you may end up finding someone who understands the brand values and provides value-oriented services.
Consider the Timeline
Is the website launch planned for a week? Start using the AI website builder immediately. There are plenty of options you can choose from. This tool would help you bring the website to life in less than an hour. But always remember that the customer is always ready with many options before you. So make sure that you can make effective use of the AI and deliver on time. Also, weigh the proficiency of both the developer and AI. Can AI beat the proficiency of the developer and bring out the best creative outputs? If you think the developer does it better, make your choice then.
Know the Complexity
The next thing you’ve got to ask yourself is about the website complexity—will your website be static or dynamic? If you’re planning to build a website with fewer changes, then ideally, you can choose an AI website builder. However, if you’re looking for help with a website that frequently adds new services, offers, or information, then you should probably consider having a web designer and developer on board. They not only help you with custom solutions but also help you with the minute additions and removal of details. Remember, the security of a dynamic website is always more complex than that of a static one.
Background Knowledge Check
A major parameter that matters while choosing between website builders and custom web design is the developers' and designers' background knowledge. If your team just has basic developer and coding knowledge, then you should choose an AI website builder. But if you have no idea about web designing and yet have an urgent requirement, then switch to a custom web design after conducting a quick and deep research. In this aspect, it is best to go for a custom service, where you can readily avail prompt and professional assistance.
Confirm Your Tech Stack
Today, every business requires a provider who can offer all its services under one roof. If that’s the same requirement you have, then it's wise to choose a custom web design provider. However, one thing to remember is that you need to choose the right tech stack for your platform, in either website builders or custom services, and stick to it rather than shuffling back and forth. Getting custom website services is even better, as you can get professional guidance in choosing the right tech stack and make a wiser choice with experienced professionals.
Winding Up
AI is booming in its usage, as it works quickly, flexibly, and time-sparingly. But something that you must always know, that the technology won’t admit, is that it lacks the creativity and eye for detail of a custom service provider. Yet, AI cannot be completely abandoned as a choice when it comes to meeting the future requirements when you are short of ideas or time, or even resources. Ready to pick and choose the best web designing company in Kerala for your business? Skim and shortlist the best providers who are available to work with you at affordable prices and understand your product and service requirements to fulfill them in the best possible manner. Time is of the essence, and there are updates happening every now and then! You don’t want to be left behind, do you? Invest in the right sources to attain long-term success.
