The recent advancements in generative AI have made it a fantastic productivity tool. Naturally, we've been thinking about how we can use AI to make Umso even better. Our mission is to make building websites simple and accessible for everyone. How can AI help with that?
As with so many other things, the first step in creating a website is usually the hardest. To give customers more than just a blank page to work with, many website builders provide pre-built templates. Templates can be great, however, we think we can do better in the age of AI. That's why we built our website generator!
Our website generator is free to use and you can even try it out without creating an account! It will ask you a few questions about the kind of website you want to create and then guide you through the process of creating a first draft. Once you have that first version, you can automatically generate text for almost all of your site. And if your chosen content includes images, then our AI will also find suitable pictures for your project.
Generative AI has its strengths and weaknesses. We created a website generator that leverages the strengths of AI while leaving the parts that it's not so good at to more traditional code. This is very common for AI-based software and what usually happens when you see something marketed as "powered by AI".
While generative AI is very good at generating text and getting better fast at generating images, it isn't very good or effective yet at building entire websites. That's because websites are effectively very structured documents. Not only do they commonly follow similar layout patterns, they are also built with HTML, which in itself has to be structured correctly for the browser to interpret.
We also want you to be able to edit the generated website in our website editor of course since to most people, the code is not very useful. Our editor requires a certain kind of format, so we need to make sure that the generated website follows that format.
As you answer the questions in our generator, we automatically pick the best sections for your use-case in the background, using traditional algorithms. The sections are pre-designed and fully responsive. That means we don't have to rely on AI for a consistent website design.
When it comes to the theme of your website, we provide you with color and font presets to play around with. Again we're not using AI here because a having a professional designer prepare these allows for better quality control.
Once you have the first version of your website put together, you can use AI to generate text for the entire page, based on your unique use-case, because what really makes your website stand out will be its content.
Our website engine combines your website description with structured data about the page you have assembled in the previous steps. We tell AI what kind of text it should generate for which section of your website.
In the above example, you can see how the FAQ section was automatically populated with reasonable questions and answers based on the input prompt. We don't just do this for your FAQ section, we do it for your entire website.
Here's the hero section of that same website. Both of these screenshots are taken directly from our live generator with no alternations.
To really get a feel for how cool this is, you should just give it a try yourself! Head over to app.umso.com/generator to see our website generator in action, no signup required!