Is AI Replacing Web Design?
AI can now generate a decent-looking landing page from a sentence. That is genuinely new, and anyone claiming it changes nothing is not paying attention. But "can produce a page" and "can replace web design" are different claims, and the gap between them is where the actual answer sits.
What AI is genuinely good at now
- First drafts. Layout options, copy starting points, colour and type pairings, in seconds rather than hours.
- Repetitive production. Resizing, variants, alt text drafts, boilerplate markup, the mechanical parts of the job.
- Code assistance. Scaffolding components, writing tests, explaining unfamiliar code, catching obvious mistakes.
- Content operations. Summarising, restructuring and adapting existing material for different formats.
Used well, this compresses the boring middle of a project. We use these tools ourselves, and it is faster than not using them.
What it is still bad at
Knowing what the business actually needs. AI will happily design the site you asked for rather than the one you should have asked for. Most of the value in a project comes from the questions asked in week one, and those require understanding a market, a customer and a commercial goal.
Editorial judgment. Deciding what to leave out is the hardest part of design. Generative tools tend towards adding, not cutting.
Brand distinctiveness. These models are trained on what already exists, so they trend towards the average of everything. That is exactly wrong for a business trying to look different from its competitors. AI-generated sites increasingly share a recognisable sameness.
Accountability. If a form silently fails, if the site breaks on an older phone, if a legal claim in the copy is wrong, someone has to be responsible. A tool cannot be.
What this means if you are buying a website
Be aware that some of what you are quoted for may take less time than it used to. That is fine, you are paying for outcome and accountability, not keystrokes. But it does mean you should be sceptical of anyone charging premium prices for output that is obviously generated and unedited.
Ask a supplier how they use these tools. Anyone claiming they do not is either behind or not being straight with you. Anyone whose process is entirely generated is selling you a template with extra steps.
The genuine shift
The floor has risen. Making something is now nearly free, which means merely having a website is no longer a differentiator, and low-end design work is being commoditised.
What has become more valuable is everything around the artefact: strategy, structure, editing, taste, engineering quality, and someone who will answer the phone when it breaks.
Our honest position
We use AI where it makes us faster and refuse to use it where it makes the work generic. A senior designer with these tools beats both a senior designer without them and a tool without a designer. That is likely to stay true for a while.
If you want a site built by people who will tell you when you are asking for the wrong thing, that is what we do, and our pricing is published so you can see exactly what it costs.