The article
A website in thirty seconds?
You see it more and more often in television and online advertising: click a button, tell AI what kind of website you want, and moments later a complete website appears. Text, images, navigation and a professional-looking design are all included.
It almost sounds too good to be true.
But the remarkable thing is that it really is possible.
Ask AI to build a website for a restaurant, a consultancy or a photographer, and within minutes you can often get a surprisingly usable result. Where building a website once required knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, a few sentences can now take you a long way.
Yet there is an important difference between generating a website and developing a good website.
And that difference becomes clear as soon as you want something more.
Why do so many AI websites look alike?
AI is particularly good at recognising and applying existing patterns. It knows what a modern website usually looks like: a prominent introduction at the top, a striking button, a few service cards, attractive images and a contact section at the bottom.
Those are not necessarily bad design choices. They often work perfectly well.
But give several AI systems the same general instructions, and you will regularly see similar results: the same rounded cards, gradients, shadows, oversized headings and familiar page layouts.
The website looks professional, but it does not always have an identity of its own.
That does not mean AI cannot produce an original design. Quite the opposite. With enough direction, good examples and targeted refinements, you can achieve some remarkable results.
Someone still needs to know which direction the design should take, though.
What kind of look suits the business? How do you guide visitors through the information? What should stand out, and what should remain in the background? How do you make sure the website works just as convincingly on a phone as it does on a large screen?
These are design questions, not problems you solve simply by pressing a button.
A website is more than what appears on the screen
An attractive homepage does not make a complete website.
Suppose you ask AI for a website featuring services, projects, news articles and a contact page. AI can generate those pages quite well, often complete with sample copy and images.
But what happens when you want to add a new service next week? Or publish an article? Or make the same information available in both Dutch and English?
If all the content is written directly into the source code, updating the website quickly becomes a technical task.
For a small, simple website, that may not be a problem. But as a website grows, you will usually want to manage its content without having to change the code every time.
That is where a Content Management System (CMS) comes in.
With a CMS such as Drupal, you can manage content in a structured way. Rather than creating unrelated pages, you define services, products, projects and articles as distinct content types.
You can then reuse that content in different places, link it to other content and offer it in multiple languages.
Adding a new service no longer means programming a new page. You fill in the appropriate fields, and the system makes the information appear where it is needed.
And this is where it gets interesting: AI can also help develop a system like this. But to do that well, you need to understand how the content is organised, which relationships are needed and how the different components communicate.
What if you separate the design from the CMS?
On many traditional websites, presentation and content management are closely connected. The CMS not only manages the content but also generates the page that visitors see.
That works extremely well for many applications, but it is not the only option.
You can separate those two parts instead. This is known as a headless or decoupled architecture.
For the new Visual Shapers website, for example, I use a combination of Drupal and Astro.
Drupal manages the content: text, images, services, projects, articles and the relationships between them.
Astro handles what visitors see. It retrieves the required data and uses it to build the website.
With a fully static setup, Astro generates the HTML pages in advance. The web server does not need to call Drupal or query a database on every visit just to assemble a page.
Visitors simply receive the page that has already been generated.
When content changes in Drupal, a new build process can update the static website.
The strength of this approach is that you combine the freedom of a modern frontend framework with the convenience of a mature CMS.
You do not have to choose between a uniquely designed website and easy content management. You can have both.
Can a website like this be more secure?
Security is another important subject that rarely gets much attention in advertisements for AI website builders.
Websites are constantly visited by automated bots looking for known vulnerabilities, outdated software, poorly secured forms or exposed administration functions.
Of course, this does not only happen to websites built with AI.
But the way a website is built has a significant influence on the risks it faces.
With a traditional dynamic website, the server often has to execute application code and possibly retrieve information from a database every time someone visits.
For the public pages of a pre-generated Astro website, that is unnecessary. Visitors receive ordinary HTML, CSS and, where needed, JavaScript.
This removes much of the dynamic functionality that would otherwise be publicly accessible. It can significantly reduce the attack surface.
For example, an attacker cannot exploit a vulnerability in the PHP code of the underlying CMS directly through the public website if that CMS is not reachable through the public site at all.
But static does not automatically mean secure.
A static website can still contain vulnerabilities, for example in JavaScript, third-party services, forms or infrastructure. And the underlying Drupal installation still needs to be properly secured, updated and protected from unnecessary access.
The benefit, then, is not one magical technology. It comes from making deliberate architectural choices.
So what role does AI still play?
Perhaps this makes AI sound less useful than the advertisements suggest.
But the opposite is true.
AI can be a tremendous help when developing websites like these. Not just for generating an initial design, but also for writing and improving code, setting up components, building integrations, analysing errors and running checks.
I use AI myself as a tool throughout the development process. It lets me try out ideas much faster and explore solutions that used to take considerably more time.
But AI does not automatically make the right decisions.
It may suggest a technically working solution that is difficult to maintain in the long run. It can introduce unnecessary complexity, duplicate existing functionality or overlook important security concerns.
And sometimes it produces code that looks convincing but simply does not do what you expect.
That is why experience still matters. You need to be able to assess AI suggestions, understand why something works and recognise when a different approach would be better.
AI accelerates development, but it does not replace the thinking that goes into a well-designed system.
Should every website be built with Drupal and Astro?
Certainly not.
For a small website with just a few fixed pages, an AI website builder can be an excellent choice. Especially when speed, simplicity and a limited budget matter more than advanced features or a completely custom design.
There is no reason to build a complicated architecture when a simple solution does exactly what is needed.
But requirements change when a website becomes part of a business's everyday operations.
You may eventually want to support multiple languages, exchange data with other systems, reuse content across several websites or add new functionality.
That is when thinking ahead becomes important.
Not to build everything in advance, but to avoid starting from scratch every time a new requirement comes along.
Ultimately, the best technology is not the newest or most complicated. It is the technology that fits what you need today and what you may want to do tomorrow.
The future of web development
AI has fundamentally changed web development.
Tasks that once took days can sometimes be completed in hours. Ideas can be developed more quickly, prototypes tested sooner and technical barriers have become lower.
That is a wonderful development, including for people who are not programmers themselves.
But as generating a website becomes easier, the value of web development is shifting.
It is becoming less about being able to write code alone and more about understanding the needs behind the request.
How do you organise information? How do you create a recognisable identity? Which technical choices make a website fast, secure, accessible and maintainable? And how do you ensure it can grow with the business?
At Visual Shapers, I therefore see AI not as a replacement for web development, but as a powerful part of it. A tool that helps you work faster and more creatively, provided you know how to use it.
Creating a website with AI is surprisingly easy these days. Creating a website that genuinely suits you, keeps working well and grows alongside your ambitions still takes expertise.
And that is precisely what makes web development in the age of AI so interesting.