Pros and Cons of AI Website Design You Must Know About

AI is not just about robots and automation anymore. Today, you can use various AI website design tools to empower your web design process. Ever since Midjourney and ChatGPT got into the spotlight, human web designers made sure not to leave any stone unturned while discussing whether this new technology will do more harm than good or vice versa.

In this article, our web agency Chicago will explore the exciting world of AI website design. We’ll show you how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the web design industry and how you can use AI solutions to create stunning websites that captivate your audience. But you’ll also learn the limitations AI technology still needs to overcome regarding web design. This will help you avoid all the potential obstacles down the road to powerful AI website design. So let’s start!

What Should a Web Designer Know About AI?

As a web designer, you may have encountered the term “AI” a lot lately. So let’s quickly explain it. AI stands for “Artificial Intelligence.” It’s a branch of computer science that aims to create intelligent machines that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, like visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, advanced natural language processing, and much more.

Let’s quickly break down how artificial intelligence works from a technical perspective. AI is based on the concept of machine learning, which involves training a computer algorithm on a large dataset to identify patterns and relationships between data points. The algorithm uses these patterns to make predictions or decisions based on new data that it encounters. AI design tools have become very good at recognizing and reproducing different art styles, color schemes, and much more.

AI website design might be a game-changer for human web designers. You can use it to streamline your workflow, enhance user experience, and drive conversions. It’s definitely worth exploring the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning and seeing how AI website design can transform the digital environments you create.

However, you also need to be aware of the different limitations of AI website design. We’ll explore them all and show why the human touch is crucial for creating top-performing websites.

Benefits of Using AI in Web Design

While we don’t advise completely relying on artificial intelligence during the website creation process, there are still various ways in which you can benefit from using it as a web designer. Let’s quickly explore some of the tasks you’re facing daily and see how AI website design tools can help you make them more fun and accurate:

Use AI to get fresh web design ideas

AI can be an excellent tool for generating fresh web design ideas and app concepts. Using machine learning algorithms, AI can analyze a vast amount of data, learn from it, and develop creative solutions that human web designers might not have thought of.

One way to use AI in web design is to utilize generative design tools like Designs.ai. These tools can create various design options based on specific parameters and requirements that you insert. You can then quickly and easily explore different possibilities. For example, if you’re designing a website for a fashion brand, you can input the brand’s color scheme and style preferences. AI website design tools will then generate different layouts, typography, and graphic elements that fit the brand’s aesthetic.

Generate imagery and brand visuals

Generating visuals for web design using AI tools is becoming increasingly popular due to the efficiency and quality they bring to the web design process.

Machine learning algorithms can help you generate just any type of visuals that you want. For example, you can use AI graphic design tools to enrich your organic shapes design, create illustrations for your hero section, generate color schemes based on your preferences, create brand logos and brand kits, call to action button design, and much more.

If you’re tired of using stock images, tools like Midjourney can help you generate just any imagery you can think of. With suitable prompts, opportunities are limitless. However, we advise you to double-check AI-generated visuals before putting them on your web apps, as you might notice small mistakes that require fixing. We’ll get to that part later. Still, using AI graphic design tools is a great way to gather various ideas quickly and overcome creative blocks.

Using AI-generated copy will help you align design elements with more accuracy.

Creating realistic copy will help you align content more accurately during the design process

Thanks to various AI content creation tools, you don’t need to use lorem ipsum filler copy in your design process. For example, if you’re working on a travel website design, you can use AI tools to quickly generate attractive city descriptions. Although some web designers prefer using generic placeholder text, we advise creating more realistic copy as it will help you align your content blocks more accurately and allow you to plan visual hierarchy.

AI and UX design: Using artificial intelligence to boost user experience

AI and UX mix together perfectly. Let’s explore some of the ways you can use artificial intelligence to make your websites more enjoyable and meet specific user requirements for a website design:

Use AI to understand user behavior and preferences: By analyzing large amounts of data on user interactions with a website, AI can uncover patterns and insights that might not be immediately apparent to human designers. For example, you can use AI to create a more personalized and intuitive user experience that caters to each user’s unique needs and preferences. This is possible because artificial intelligence thrives when tracking user behavior across your website or app.
Generate user personas: You can use AI in UX design to automate tasks that usually require a lot of time from your side. One such task is creating user personas. As we’ve already mentioned, artificial intelligence is potent when it comes to analyzing large chunks of data. You can use various AI tools to analyze data from previous users or get better insights into user feedback. This way, you’ll be able to identify common pain points and suggest potential solutions quickly.
Create accessible designs: You can use artificial intelligence to analyze user engagement patterns. This will help you with optimizing layouts for readability, enhancing navigation design, and editing interfaces to make your website more accessible for people with disabilities. And you can even add artificial intelligence chatbots to help users with any questions they might have.

AI Can Help You With Keyword Research and Content Optimization

Optimizing your website for valuable keywords is essential if you want to drive more traffic to it. And AI keyword research can help you with that. While traditional methods are still the best way to go if you want to identify relevant keywords that users search for in Google, using AI is becoming increasingly important in some other aspects.

With AI-powered tools, you can analyze your website’s content to identify weak areas. For example, you might find out that some of your headlines and meta descriptions are too long or don’t include focus keywords. If your website is complex, you’d have a hard time finding those weak spots manually.

And when it comes to content writing, AI can also help you out. With natural language processing (NLP) technology, AI-powered tools can help you structure your content just the right way to make it work better with users and search engines. These tools can suggest relevant keywords and topics, help you write more concise and engaging content, and even analyze your writing to help you sound like an expert.

You can use AI to identify potential problems with your website and fix them as quickly as possible.

AI Can Help You Find and Prioritize Problems During Website Audits

AI can be of enormous help when it comes to performing a website audit. You can use artificial intelligence to quickly analyze large amounts of data and identify potential issues that might be difficult for a human to notice. Here are a few ways we at Alpha Efficiency utilize AI during a website audit:

Automated crawling and analysis: You can use AI-powered web crawlers to scan your entire website and identify any technical issues, such as broken links, missing tags, or slow-loading pages. Doing all of this manually for each web page would require a lot of time.
Data visualization: You can use some of the best AI tools for digital marketing to visualize your website data in new and informative ways, making it easier to identify trends and prioritize issues. For example, you could use a tool that creates a heat map of user clicks on your site to find out which areas of your site are getting the most attention and which need some improvement.
Predictive analytics: AI can help you predict potential issues before they occur. For example, suppose your website is experiencing slow load times. In that case, an AI-powered tool can identify the root cause of the problem and predict which pages will likely experience issues in the future.

While you shouldn’t entirely rely on artificial intelligence during your website audits, you can use it to automate some of the more tedious tasks and get new insights into your data.

AI Website Design Can Be a Waste Of Time – Here’s why…

Artificial intelligence does a fantastic job in certain aspects of the design process, which raises the question of whether web designers are in demand. However, while web design companies are definitely going to use AI tools in the future, it’s unlikely that this technology will ever completely replace human web designers. This is because AI has specific limitations that sometimes make artificial intelligence website design a complete waste of time. Let’s see why you need to be careful when using AI in web design:

Artificial Intelligence is not creative in a way human beings are. That's why AI-generated website design often lacks uniqueness and originality.

AI Lacks Truly Unique Creativity That Human Web Designers Posses

Artificial intelligence is not capable of creative thinking in the same way a human is. While you can use it to analyze data and get suggestions for design elements that may be effective, don’t expect AI to come up with truly unique and innovative design ideas on its own.

If you want to create one-in-a-kind websites, it’s crucial to have a team of professional web designers or hire a website design company. They’ll be able to provide that creative spark artificial intelligence lacks, at least for now.

AI can help you write website code, but…

You can use AI to generate website code, therefore reducing the time and effort writing code from scratch requires. This is particularly useful when building websites with complex functionality or large volumes of content. But this approach comes with both pros and cons.

AI can generate code much faster than humans, saving you valuable time you can spend on other tasks. However, AI-generated code may lack the accuracy that professional web developers can achieve. You might also end up with less flexible code that’s hard to customize or modify as needed.

AI Struggles with Design Aspects That Require Contextual Understanding

There are many factors to consider when designing an eCommerce website. It’s essential to take the surrounding context into account when making decisions. For example, consider the layout of a webpage. A good web designer will consider the purpose of the page, the intended audience, and the content that will be displayed to create a page layout that’s both visually appealing and easy to navigate. This requires understanding the broader context in which you’ll present the page to the audience.

On the other hand, AI operates based on algorithms and statistical analysis. While this can be incredibly useful in certain situations, it can also result in a website that fails to evoke the desired emotions and deliver the right message.

Let’s check another example – choosing a color scheme. When choosing colors for a website, human designers consider the aesthetic appeal of specific color combinations and the cultural and psychological associations that different colors may have. On the other hand, an AI web design tool may simply analyze current colors and attempt to create a pleasing combination without considering these broader contextual factors. The same principles apply when choosing font combinations and many other design elements.

AI web design tools Often Produce Unusable Imagery And Require A Lot Of Tweaking

One of the most significant issues with AI-generated images is that they often turn out to be unusable or just plain weird. AI graphic design tools work with algorithms and patterns rather than true creativity and intuition. Artificial intelligence doesn’t really understand the aesthetic principles that make an image visually pleasing or the context that makes it appropriate for a particular website. It can take a lot of time to come up with the right prompt to get the desired results. You’ll lose hours trying to make AI generate an image you’ve got on your mind, while human designers could create the same image within minutes.

And if you want to add your personal touch to website imagery, don’t count on AI tools. While Midjourney can produce many images quickly, it usually fails to capture your unique style or brand identity.

Don’t Use AI Website Builders If You Want Flexible and Unique Website

Recently, the website builder industry has exploded as people started looking for ways to create a website quickly without any coding. But while AI website builders may seem convenient, they’re not the best choice if you’re looking for a truly unique and flexible website.

First off, by using AI website builders, you’re limiting yourself to pre-made templates and design options. While these templates may look good, it’s challenging to customize them to fit your brand guidelines perfectly. You might not be able to change certain aspects of your artificial intelligence website that you find important, or you might end up with a website that looks too similar to others within your industry. On the other hand, custom-coded websites offer more flexibility and customization. You’ll be writing code from scratch, which means you’ll have complete control over the design and functionality. By working with web developers, you can create a website tailored to your exact needs and the needs of your target audience. Do you want to create a custom login system or integrate your website with an external database? Custom code is a must.

Also, AI website builders lack the ability to create clean and efficient code. You’ll end up with bloated and messy code, which can cause slow site speed and cause poor user experience. In contrast, skilled professionals from our web development agency Chicago can create streamlined and optimized code for speed and functionality.

And don’t get us wrong; AI website builders can be a good option for simple websites. But if you plan on creating a complex, high-quality website, make sure to build a custom website from scratch.

Final Thoughts

While AI website design does offer some advantages, and you can use various AI design software to create better websites, it still has many limitations. To get the best results, it’s crucial to combine AI’s efficiency with human web designers’ creativity and expertise.

Custom web design remains the best option for businesses wanting to achieve a strong online presence and stand out from the competition. With our Chicago web design for small businesses, you can create a website that is tailored to your specific needs, optimized for user experience and SEO, and easy to update and modify as needed.

So, if you need help creating a world-class web design, don’t hesitate to get in touch with Alpha Efficiency and introduce us to your company and its goals. By following best practices and utilizing only the strong sides of modern technology, our experts will help you build a high-performing website perfectly tailored for your brand and target audience. So let’s partner up and embark on an exciting journey together!