It is a fair question, and it is being asked far more than it was six months ago. Somebody has mentioned that you can create a website with AI now, and either you have already had a go or you are about to.
The short answer is yes, you genuinely can. You describe the site you want, and you get back something that looks good, reads well and works. That is not a trick and it is not a toy. These tools have become properly capable at the part they are good at, and an owner with a free afternoon can now get further than a fortnight would have taken five years ago.
The longer answer is that building the site was never the hard part of having one.
What actually happens when you create a website with AI
You describe your business in ordinary language. It produces pages, headings, copy, images and a layout. You say the tone is too formal, or you want the prices further up, and it changes them while you watch. There is no brief to write, nobody to book and nothing to wait for.
It is very good at first drafts, at filling a blank page, and at making something look considered rather than improvised. If you have ever stared at an empty page wondering how to describe your own business, having something to react to is worth a great deal on its own.
So there is nothing to be sniffy about here. The instinct to have a go is a good one, and the results are usually better than people expect.
A website is not a document. It is a service that has to keep running
This is the part the excitement skips over.
A document is finished when you stop typing. A website has to be up at two in the morning on a bank holiday. It has to still work after the software underneath it changes. It has to be recoverable when something goes wrong, and something eventually does.
Building it is day one. The other three hundred and sixty four days are the job, and that is where the questions below come from. None of them is a gotcha. Every one of them has caught out professional developers too, which is precisely why the industry built tools to deal with them.
1. Can you get it back to how it was on Tuesday?
AI makes changes quickly and confidently, and that includes the wrong ones. You ask it to adjust the pricing page, and there is a reasonable chance it rewrites more than you meant. Often you will not notice for a fortnight.
If your only record of what changed is a chat window, then "put it back how it was on Tuesday" is a request nobody can carry out precisely. You are reconstructing from memory.
Professional teams solve this by recording every change, so any earlier state can be recovered exactly. It is unglamorous and it is the single most useful safety net there is. If nobody set it up for your site, your undo is whatever you last happened to copy somewhere.
2. Who is holding a copy, and has anyone tried putting it back?
An untested backup is a belief, not a backup.
There are two separate questions. Is a copy being taken automatically, without anybody having to remember? And has anyone ever restored one to prove it works? A backup nobody has tested tends to fail on the one day it matters, and the failure is discovered at the worst possible moment.
It is also worth being clear about what "the website" actually is. There are the pages and images, and there is usually a database behind them holding enquiries, any content added since launch, and your settings. A copy of one but not the other is not a copy.
3. Where does it live, and whose name is on the account?
This is the quiet one that genuinely strands businesses, and it has nothing to do with AI. It is just easy to skip when you are moving fast.
The domain gets registered on somebody's personal email address. The hosting sits on a card that later expires. The settings that point your domain at your website live in an account one person set up and nobody else can reach. Then that person changes role, or leaves, or simply cannot remember which email address they used.
Write down four things: who owns the domain, where its settings are managed, where the site is hosted, and who can get into each. If any answer is "I think it was my old email", deal with that before anything else on this list.
4. It is a real website, on the real internet
The moment it is live it is reachable by everybody, and a fair slice of the traffic any small site receives is automated software looking for a way in. It is nothing personal and you are not too small to be found.
- Contact forms get abused. At best you get spam. At worse a badly built form is used to send mail that appears to come from your domain, which damages the deliverability of your real email too.
- The software underneath goes stale. Every website sits on layers of other people's code. Those layers get security fixes released against them, publicly, and somebody has to actually apply them. Nothing about the site looks different on the day it stops being patched.
- Passwords and keys end up somewhere public. Pasting a key into a file that later gets uploaded to a public code repository is one of the most common ways small sites are compromised, and it usually happens by accident.
- Nobody is watching. If the site goes down, or the contact form quietly stops delivering, how would you find out? For most self built sites the answer is that a customer tells you, which means the damage is already done. We have written about that failure mode separately.
There is also a compliance floor that is yours regardless of who or what built the site. If you are tracking visitors you need proper cookie consent. You need to be straight about what happens to the details people type into your contact form. And you have a reasonable obligation to make the site usable by people with disabilities. An AI will not raise any of this with you unless you ask.
5. Will anyone actually find it?
This is the one owners mind most and notice last.
AI is good at making a page look right. It is much less reliable at the invisible parts that decide whether the page ever appears in a search: the titles and descriptions search engines read, a sitemap that tells them what exists, and above all the redirects from your old web addresses to the new ones.
That last point is the expensive one. If you replace a site and the old addresses simply stop working, you inherit none of the standing the old site had built up, sometimes over years. It does not fail loudly on launch day. Enquiries thin out over the following weeks, by which time nobody connects the two events.
6. Who do you ring at four o'clock on a Friday?
The assistant that built your site will help you cheerfully at any hour. It will also have no memory of what it did last month, no idea what your business does on a Friday afternoon, and no way of logging into your hosting account to find out why the site is offline.
When something is properly wrong, what you want is a person who already knows how your site is put together and can go and look.
None of this is an argument against using AI
It is an argument against using it with nothing underneath.
What is missing from a site built this way is not skill or design sense. It is the dull infrastructure nobody enjoys building, nobody wants to pay for, and nobody thinks about until the day they need it. Version history. Automatic backups that have been tested. Patching. Monitoring. A phone number.
That is more or less exactly what we built, which is why we have a view on it.
The same AI, with a floor under it
blu::web is our website platform, and blu::clive is the AI module that sits alongside it. Taking the six questions above in the same order:
- Getting back to Tuesday. Every page and every reusable section keeps a version history, and you can roll either back to an earlier published version. Because sections are shared between pages, if a rollback would change other pages as well, it tells you which ones before you confirm rather than after. Separately, nothing you edit goes live until you publish it, so a half finished change can sit staged for a week without a visitor ever seeing it.
- Copies. The whole installation is backed up every night, automatically, on a schedule the platform arranges itself rather than something a person has to remember. That covers the database and your uploaded content, kept on a rolling retention. When a backup is restored it takes a fresh safety copy first, so the restore itself can be undone, and it never deletes files that have arrived since, so newer content is not wiped out by an older copy.
- Where it lives. Managed UK hosting on Amazon Web Services, on our account and monitored by us, with certificates, updates and scaling included rather than billed as extras. You are not the person maintaining a server.
- The real internet. Security updates are applied proactively across the platform, so every site gets them without anyone requesting it. We are Cyber Essentials certified under the NCSC backed scheme. Contact forms are part of the platform with spam protection already on them, rather than something bolted on and hoped for.
- Being found. The tools for page titles, descriptions and search engine instructions are built in, and the site produces its own sitemap. When we move a site we handle the redirects from the old addresses, because that is the part that quietly costs money.
- Somebody to ring. A UK team, on a normal telephone number, who built the platform your site runs on.
And you still get to use AI for the enjoyable part. With blu::clive you describe a section and it writes it, already in your brand colours and typefaces and already linking to your real pages rather than to invented ones. You can hand it a screenshot of a layout you like and have it built. It generates images. It reviews your pages for search visibility as you publish them.
The difference is not that you stop using AI to design your website. It is that the AI is working inside something that keeps versions, takes backups every night and answers the phone.
What this will not do
- It will not know your business. blu::clive writes a good draft, but the judgement about what your business should actually say is still yours. A site nobody keeps current is a poor site however it was built.
- A structured platform is a constraint as well as a safety net. If what you want is genuinely unusual, a well made set of building blocks will frustrate you. Tell us early and we will say honestly whether it fits or whether you want something built from scratch, which we also do.
- It will not make you rank on its own. Good tools remove the technical obstacles. What earns the position is useful content and time, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something.
- A backup restores content, not decisions. It will not un-send an email or un-take an order. It protects you from accidents, not from choices.
If you have already built one
Then keep it. That was not wasted work, and the design thinking you did is the valuable half.
Ask the six questions above about what you have. If the answers are comfortable, you are in a better position than plenty of businesses paying for something professional. If several of them made you pause, that is worth an hour of somebody's time before it becomes worth a weekend of it.
We are happy to look at what you have built and tell you where the gaps are, whether or not you end up moving it to us. Get in touch or call 0330 133 1599.