You’ve had a go at building a website with AI. Maybe ChatGPT or Claude designed a home page for you, and it looks pretty good. Now you’re stuck, wondering how to turn it into a website people can find and use.
If that’s you, you’re in good company. Over 25 years I’ve had plenty of clients design their own website in Photoshop or Canva, some of them genuinely good, and then hit exactly the same wall: now how do I make this an actual website? One where customers can make an enquiry, buy something, book an appointment or sign up to a newsletter? AI has made the design part far easier, but the part after it hasn’t changed much.
Below is the path I’d suggest, step by step, with links to the tools and services you’ll need along the way. You can do most of it yourself if you’re keen.
Whatever you’ve made isn’t wasted, even if it ends up being rebuilt, because it now works as a brief. You’ve worked out what you like, what you don’t, what pages you need and roughly how you want it to look. That used to take hours of meetings and back-and-forth. Hang on to every version, screenshot and prompt you’ve used, because they’ll save time whichever path you take from here.
Step 1: Work out what you have
“I made a website with AI” can mean quite different things, and each one needs a different next step.
A picture of a website. If ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Canva produced an image or mockup, you’ve got a design idea that still needs to be built. That’s a normal and perfectly good starting point.
Code. If a chatbot wrote HTML for you, or you used Lovable, Bolt or v0, you’ve got a working prototype made of code. It can be put online, but changing it later usually means more prompting or editing code. Make sure you have a copy of the code you can keep. Most of these tools let you download it or connect a GitHub account, and it’s worth doing now while it’s fresh.
A site inside a builder. If you used WordPress.com, Wix, Squarespace or Elementor’s AI tools, the site lives on that platform. It’s closer to being live, but you’re working within that platform’s rules, features and pricing. A WordPress.com site can be moved to your own WordPress hosting later, which we help people do regularly. Wix and Squarespace sites can’t simply be moved and usually need rebuilding elsewhere.
Step 2: Check it does the job before you polish it
Hold off on fiddling with colours. First ask whether it does what your business needs. Who is it for? What should visitors do when they get there? Is it clear within a few seconds what you offer and why someone should choose you? It’s much easier to fix the structure now than after you’ve added every page.
Ask yourself, too, whether your customers would recognise your website as yours if a competitor copied it tomorrow. AI tends to produce the average of every website it has seen, so if your draft could belong to any business in your industry, fix that first. My post on the 90% of website design AI doesn’t see covers what designers look at and includes a quick self-check you can run.
Step 3: Make the words yours
AI copy reads smoothly, but it’s usually generic. It talks about “tailored solutions” and “a passion for excellence” without saying anything a customer can use, because AI was never in the room with your customers.
Use their language instead. Gather enquiry emails, reviews, notes from phone calls and the questions people ask you over and over. Paste them into your AI tool and ask it to list the exact phrases customers use, the problems they mention most and the worries that come up before they buy. Then rewrite each page around those words, covering what you do, where you do it, who it’s for, how pricing works and why people choose you.
While you’re at it, cut the AI giveaways: words like “elevate”, “seamless”, “unlock” and “empower”, and any sentence you wouldn’t say out loud. Your own words, even a bit rough, almost always beat polished AI filler. If writing isn’t your thing, we also offer AI-assisted content writing that’s shaped around your voice.
Step 4: Sort out the images
AI drafts are usually filled with placeholder images or generic stock-style photos. Real photos of you, your team, your premises and your work will do more for trust than anything else on the page. Where you don’t have good photos, high-quality AI images can fill the gaps, as long as they don’t pretend to be your staff or products. Our AI image refresh service covers how we approach that.
Step 5: Get your domain and email sorted
This is where most people building with AI get stuck, because it’s the first step that happens outside the AI tool.
Register your domain in your own name. Register it yourself rather than through your designer, a relative or a platform account you can’t get out of. For a .com.au domain you’ll need an Australian presence such as an ABN, and the name needs to match or be closely connected to your business. auDA sets the rules if you want the details. The shorter .au domains, like yourbusiness.au, are also available.
Set up email on your domain. Quotes from yourname@yourbusiness.com.au look far more credible than a Gmail address. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are the two most common options for small businesses.
Keep a record of every login: the domain registrar, hosting, email and website. You’d be surprised how many businesses lose access to their own domain because nobody wrote it down.
Step 6: Choose where it will live
Your website needs hosting, which is where it lives on the internet. This is also the point where you decide whether you own your website or rent it.
With a builder platform, you’re renting. It’s convenient, but you’re tied to their features and pricing, and moving later is hard. With WordPress (the free WordPress.org version, on your own hosting), you own it. You can move it to another host, add almost any feature through plugins, and almost any web developer in Australia can work on it. That’s why we recommend it for most small businesses.
If you go with your own hosting, choose a provider with Australian servers, daily backups and support you can reach when you need it. Cheap hosting is rarely a saving once something goes wrong.
Step 7: Be realistic about prototypes
Tools like Lovable and Bolt are brilliant for building something quickly, and the results can look fantastic. The catch is that what you end up with is an app made of code. That’s fine if you’re comfortable maintaining code, or plan to keep prompting the same tool for every change. For most small businesses it becomes a problem the first time they want to change their opening hours, add a staff member or write a blog post, and each new prompt risks breaking something that was working.
In that case, using the prototype as a design brief and rebuilding it in something editable like WordPress is usually the sensible move. You keep the look and end up with a site you can update yourself.
Step 8: Add the features that make it a business website
A website that looks good is only half the job. Think about what it needs to do, and make sure each of these works properly:
- Enquiry forms that arrive in the right inbox and are protected from spam (we can help with forms)
- Bookings that sync with your calendar and send confirmations
- Online payments or a shop, including shipping, stock and GST (selling online is a project in itself)
- Newsletter sign-ups connected to a tool like Mailchimp
- Memberships or courses, if people need to log in
AI builders will happily draw a “Book now” button, but making it take real bookings is a separate job.
Step 9: Run through a pre-launch checklist
Before your site goes live, work through this list. The links are free tools that make each check easy.
- Mobile. Check every page on your own phone, and on a friend’s. Most of your visitors will be on a phone, and this is where AI layouts most often fall apart.
- Speed. Run your pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and fix anything flagged as slow on mobile.
- Contrast and readability. Pale text on light backgrounds is a classic AI look. Test your colours with the WebAIM contrast checker. Normal text should have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.
- Accessibility basics. Add descriptions to images, use proper headings and make sure forms work with a keyboard. The WCAG guidelines are the standard most people work to.
- Forms. Send a test enquiry through every form and confirm it arrives.
- Privacy policy. If you collect names, emails or other details, you should have one. Many small businesses are currently exempt from the Privacy Act, but tools like Google Analytics require a privacy policy anyway. The OAIC has plain-English guidance.
- Page titles and descriptions. Each page needs a sensible title and description so Google knows what it’s about.
- Google Search Console. Add your site to Google Search Console so you can see whether Google is finding your pages.
- Google Business Profile. Link your site from your Google Business Profile. For local businesses this matters as much as the website itself, and we can help set it up.
- Analytics. Set up Google Analytics so you can see what’s working.
- Backups. Make sure backups are running, and that you know how to restore one.
- A real person test. Hand your phone to someone who hasn’t seen the site and ask them to find your prices or send an enquiry. Watch without helping. Wherever they hesitate, the site needs work.
Step 10: Plan for after launch
A website isn’t finished when it goes live. WordPress, plugins and themes need regular updates, security needs watching, and content needs refreshing from time to time. Decide now who’s going to do that. If it won’t be you, a maintenance plan takes care of updates, backups and security.
It’s also worth thinking about how you’ll be found in AI search as well as Google. Tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews now answer a lot of questions directly, and more and more people find businesses through those answers. Getting your website cited in them is what answer engine optimisation is about.
If you enjoyed working with AI, you can keep using it. You can connect an AI assistant to a WordPress website so you can ask for changes in plain English, while still having a normal website you can edit yourself.
When you’re asking AI for changes
If you’re carrying on with AI yourself, how you ask for changes makes a big difference. “This looks weird, can you fix it?” leaves the AI guessing, and each guess can break something else without you noticing. Instead:
- Describe what you see, where it is and what you want instead
- Take a screenshot, circle the problem and attach it
- Ask for one change at a time, and check the result on your phone
- Keep a copy of any version you’re happy with
- Ask it to review its own work, for example: “What would an experienced web designer change about this page?”
There are more tips like these in my post on the 90% of website design AI doesn’t see.
Your three options from here
Do it yourself. If you’ve got the time and enjoy learning, you can work through everything above. Expect it to take longer than the AI part did. If you’re building in WordPress, Elementor training can shorten the learning curve a lot.
Get help with the tricky bits. Plenty of people write their own content and get a professional to handle the domain, hosting, forms, search setup and launch. We offer WordPress advice and training sessions for exactly this, charged by the hour.
Hand it over. If you’d rather get back to running your business, a web designer can take your AI draft and do the lot. That’s what our AI to Reality service does. We use what you’ve made as the brief, rebuild it properly in WordPress and Elementor, and hand you a website you own and can edit.
Whichever way you go, working out what you like with AI makes the next part faster, whoever ends up doing it. If you’re still deciding whether AI is the right path at all, I’ve written an honest take on whether you should build your business website with AI.
