Our New AI Website Builder
wordpress.com
Our New AI Website Builder
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#2Speaking of WordPress, hows the entire WordPress debacle going with Matt Mullenweg?
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#3Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem.
I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add.
Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.
Maybe I'm seeing this the wrong way, and I'm forgetting truly non-technical folks exist, and this is for the people who would otherwise be forcing their nephew to help them make a basic website, and that's the role the LLM is playing here, as a conversational interface. I think the marketing copy for this announcement is total bullshit, then (plastering "AI" all over the announcement is more for marketers than customers), but I can at least see that use case.
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#4Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem. I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add. Su…
I have no idea about the quality of the sites this produces, but I think your comment about non-technical folks existing is on the money. There are many people who really don't understand how to properly structure even a simple website, and being walked through a conversation with a series of pertinent questions will be a much more satisfying process.
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#5Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem. I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add. Su…
Going from a basic template to all the little changes you need to make to build the basic shell you need for a new site is still a lot of work. Think of all the best practices cruft required for the pages typically linked to from the footer. A sporting good site is different than a directory blog is different than a single serving social media aggregation site.
I think it's plausible for AI to help with the tedious setup stuff and get you to the part where you start making it your own.
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#6Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem. I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add. Su…
I have no idea about the quality of the sites this produces, but I think your comment about non-technical folks existing is on the money. There are many people who really don't understand how to properly structure even a simple website, and being walked through a conversation with a series of pertinent questions will be a much more satisfying process.
I am one of them. Without help from a capable and kind developer friend back in 2004 I never ever would have been able to create mine.
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#7Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem. I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add. Su…
I signed up out of curiosity and it looks like it's supposed to complement the manual editing UI so you can get things done without digging through menus. After the initial prompt and wizard, it's a chat box that sits in the corner of a typical WP admin page.
But in its current state, it seemed pretty broken to me. I just wanted it to add text to the top of the front page, and it kept saying "I couldn’t find the block you mentioned. Describe where it is on the page or select it and try again." no matter how many different ways I attempted to describe it.
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#8[flagged]
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#9Speaking of WordPress, hows the entire WordPress debacle going with Matt Mullenweg?
[flagged]
Re: Our New AI Website Builder
#10Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem. I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add. Su…
> Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.
Even if that were true (which I heavily contest), people might like the idea of "I want the sidebar nav moved to the right side", not opening up template.css and template.html and figuring out which html/css they need to change.
The LLM is the thing that lets us do the fun part.
But let me disabuse you of the claim that technical people enjoy fiddling with html/css/design especially on their Wordpress website when they just want to make some changes, and somehow nontechnical people are the only ones who might have to circumvent all that fun-having by letting an LLM do it for them.
It's like saying that you don't see how LLMs could be useful to software developers because don't they enjoy writing code? Aside from the answer being no, most code isn't fun to write, you're forgetting the goal day to day is to get something done, not dick around with your Wordpress theme or software Jira tickets because it's fun.