Build your site with AI

Overview

The AI website builder writes your site for you. Fill in a few details about your business and choose how it should look: a template you like, or a custom theme the AI designs for you. Have a website already? You can start from it: we read what it shows publicly, fill in your details from it, and show you the services and prices, pages, posts, and products we found, so you check all of it before anything is built. On a template, it writes your home page — the opening section, the words in between, the button labels, and the closing call to action — then the other pages that came with the template. On a custom theme, it designs the site as well: its colors, its fonts, and every page your business needs. Either way, your name and phone number go into the header and footer — and your opening hours too, once they're on your Locations page.

It all happens on one screen: a chat on the left, a live preview of your site on the right. The first build happens once per site. After that, the same screen becomes an editor where you ask for changes in plain English, watch them land in the preview, and publish when you're happy.

Starting a site with AI

You don't have to go looking for the builder — adding a site takes you straight to it, once you've told us about your business and chosen a design.

1. On Home, click Launch new site at the top of the page.
2. Have a website already? Choose “Start from my current website,” enter its address, check the box to confirm it's your business's website and that you have the right to use its content, check the box to confirm you're 18 or older and accept our Terms and Conditions and Data Processing Agreement, then click “Read my site.” Or choose “Start fresh” to answer the questions yourself.
3. Fill in a few details about your business, or check the ones we filled in from your current website. Only the name and the kind of business are required — the rest is optional. Then click “Choose a design” — or “Review what we found,” if you started from your current website.
4. On “Review what we found,” go through the locations and hours, services and prices, questions and answers, pages, posts, products, logo, and photos we found. Leave out anything you don't want on your new site; correct the locations and hours, services and prices, product names and prices, and any post dates we had to guess; then click “Choose a design.”
5. Choose “Build a custom theme” to have the AI design your site from scratch, or one of the three templates picked for your kind of business. Browse all templates shows the rest, and every template works with the builder.
6. Check your site's address and click Create site. You land in the builder.
7. On a template, the chat opens with your new site previewing beside it. Tell it the look and feel you want, and answer the follow-ups it asks. When it has enough, it writes your site. In a hurry? “Skip the chat — build it” lets it pick a tone that suits your business.
8. Would rather start from the template's demo content? Choose “Skip — I'll build it myself” and you'll go straight to Home.
9. On a custom theme, tap through a few quick questions instead — how it should feel, what colors (your own brand colors too, if you have them), and what it should have — then click “Build my site.” It takes a minute or two, and your home page appears in the preview section by section.

Telling it about your business

Your business details come first, in a short form. Only the name and the kind of business are required. Anything else you add — what you offer, your phone number, email, service area, and licenses — is what the builder uses on your site, instead of making anything up. Addresses and opening hours come from your Locations page instead: if you started from your current website, the ones you kept are already there; otherwise, add your locations first if you want them in the first build. You can change your details later in your site's Settings, under General.

On a template, the chat then turns to look and feel: the tone and personality you want, and what to feature most. It may ask a short question or two, never more than three, and it won't interrogate you — if your first message already covers it, it gets straight to writing. If your details don't say what you offer, it asks for that first, specific enough to write real copy from.

On a custom theme, a card of quick questions takes the chat's place: how the site should feel, a starting point for its colors, what it should have (the usual picks for your kind of business come already chosen), and anything else you'd like it to know. Every answer is optional. The AI asks at most one question back — what you offer, if your details don't say.

If you started from your current website, the builder also writes from what you kept of it: your services and prices, your questions and answers, and the words of the pages you kept. Services become words and prices on your pages, not services people can book — Set up booking with AI does that.

Your first draft

When it has enough to go on, the builder writes your site in one pass. On a template, it picks which of the template's sections suit your business, puts them on your home page in an order that introduces you well, and writes every line of copy. Your other pages keep their sections and layout and get new words for what each page is for — the contact page stays the contact page. Photography and links come from the template's demo content, so every page looks finished the moment it appears.

On a custom theme, it designs as well as writes. It chooses your fonts and colors, lays out your home page from scratch, and picks the pages your business needs from about, services, menu, pricing, gallery, team, FAQ, and contact, which every site gets. It designs and writes each one and builds the navigation menu to match. Where a picture shows a scene or a thing, like materials, tools or ingredients, it can put in a free stock photo from Pixabay; the rest, like your team, your work and your place, start as simple drawings in your site's colors until you add your own photos.

Your pages are saved to your site right away, and the builder turns into the editor on the same screen: the preview reloads with your new site, and a page menu above it lets you look through every page. From there you can keep refining in the chat, open the visual editor to fine-tune anything, or head back to Home.

Brand colors and fonts

On templates that support site-wide colors, the builder also suggests three palettes chosen for your business — each one an accent for buttons and links, a page background, and a text color. A custom theme comes with four to six, the first one already applied, plus its original white and gray to go back to.

Click a palette to preview it live across the whole site, then apply the one you like. Nothing is saved until you apply it. After that, Suggest colors opens a colors card in the chat. Its three circles let you fine-tune the accent, background, or text color yourself — a color you pick applies right away, and Undo color change steps back. Under the circles, pick a direction and the AI suggests three fresh palettes to match. Hide folds the card to a single line, or closes it if you haven't changed a color in it, and Suggest colors opens it again.

You can change your fonts in the editor too. Change fonts opens a card in the chat with two lists, Headings and Body text, each font shown in its own typeface. A font you pick shows in the preview and is saved right away, like the color circles, and the card's Undo and Redo step through the changes you've made since you opened the editor. “Revert to theme fonts” puts the template's own fonts back; on a custom theme, “Revert to the AI's picks” brings back the fonts the AI chose when it built your site. As the chat carries on, the card folds to a single line, and Change fonts opens it again. You can also change your colors and fonts any time in the site's Settings, under Brand & SEO.

Changing it later, in plain English

Once your site is built, the builder stays open as an editor, and going back to it later opens the editor too. Say what you want changed — “shorten the intro”, “make the tone warmer”, “add a section about our workshops” — and it makes the change and shows you the result.

There's no need to point at a section: it works out which one you mean from your words and the page in the preview, and asks only if two could fit. A request can cover one page or every page — “make everything warmer” works across the whole site.

1. Choose a page in the preview's page menu. “This page” in a request means the one you're looking at.
2. Use the quick buttons above the message box for Punchier copy, Shorten copy, “Add a section…”, Suggest colors, Change fonts, Add images, Find photos, or Add your menu, which appears only on sites with a menu section the AI can fill.
3. Or just type what you want in your own words — the buttons are shortcuts, not the only way in.
4. Your changes are saved as unpublished drafts: the preview shows them, visitors don't. A dot beside a page in the menu means it has changes waiting.
5. Use Undo to step back a change, Discard to throw all your drafts away, or Publish changes when it's right — with changes on several pages, the button publishes them all.

Adding your menu from a photo or PDF

Already have a menu? Add photos or a PDF of it in the chat, and the AI reads the whole thing — every category, dish, description, and price, as printed — and puts it in your site's own menu sections, in place of the sample dishes. It's built to copy, not to write: a dish with no price on your menu gets none on your site, and if part of a page can't be read, like a blurred price, it tells you what, so you can fill it in.

Add your menu appears on Frost Bar & Grill, which gets your whole menu on its menu page and a few of your dishes on the home page; on Parker House; and on Bitter Neighbor Brewing, where it fills the beer lists with your beers, without prices. On a custom theme, it appears when your business is a restaurant, café, bakery, bar, brewery, food truck, caterer, or winery. It doesn't appear on Chomp, Cowlick Creamery, or Vesper Bench Vineyards, whose menus show the products in your store instead.

1. Click Add your menu above the message box. A card for your menu opens in the chat.
2. Drop photos of each page of your menu, or a PDF, onto the card, or click its box to choose them — up to 10 files, 20 MB in all. A PDF dropped anywhere on the chat goes there too.
3. Click “Put my menu on the site.” The chat names each category as it reads it, then the AI puts your menu in place and tells you where it went.
4. Check it against your menu in the preview. It's saved as a draft, like any other change: Undo takes it back off, and Publish changes puts it live.

What it writes — and what stays yours

On a template, the builder is a copywriter, not a designer. It writes and arranges words, and puts in the photos you give it; everything else stays in your hands. On a custom theme, its first build designs the site too — the colors, fonts, layouts, and pages — and from then on it works just as it does on a template.

1. It writes — headlines, body copy, and button labels, section by section on every page it builds, plus each page's title and description in search results.
2. It arranges — which sections appear on a page and in what order, including adding, removing, and moving them.
3. It suggests — brand color palettes: three at a time on templates that support site-wide colors, and four to six with a custom theme's first build.
4. It places — the photos you add to the chat with Add images, one by one or a whole folder at once, any photos copied from the pages of the website you started from, which the editor offers to add to the chat for you, and free stock photos you pick with Find photos, marked Stock. Auto-place swaps them in across your pages for the template's stock photos and any stock photos you picked, or for the drawings and stock photos on a custom theme. Wherever none of yours fit, the stock photo or drawing stays, like a cut-out of a person on a template. Stock photos are meant for pictures of a scene or a thing, not your team, your work or your place, and your own photos come first. Or say where one goes: “use photo 1 for the home page hero.” It writes each photo's alt text, the description screen readers read aloud.
5. You keep — your logo, where every button links, your navigation menu, and the final say on all of it. On a custom theme, the first build sets up the navigation menu and points each button at one of your new pages, your phone, or your email; after that, they're yours to change in the visual editor.

How we read your current website

When you start a new site from your current website, Tropic Arts' importer reads it when you ask, and only what it shows the public: its pages, sitemaps and feeds, blog posts, and store products. It doesn't sign in, send forms, or get past a password or a security check. Each reading sends a site a few requests at a time, never all at once, and stops sending them within two minutes. After you create your new site, it comes back only for the logo and photos you chose to copy. Every request it makes carries the user agent TropicArtsImporter/1.0, with a link to this page.

It reads a site only for someone who confirms it's their business's website and that they have the right to use its content, and who has accepted our Terms and Conditions and Data Processing Agreement. When our team starts a site for a client, the client must first accept them in their own account.

It doesn't read the websites of health care practices for people, places of worship, political parties or labor unions, or websites marked as being in a language other than English, since its checks only work in English. Everywhere else, before any text is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, or kept, it leaves out any page marked as being in another language, and the passages it finds that mention someone's health, religion, politics, union membership, sex life or sexual orientation, racial or ethnic origin, genetic or biometric data, criminal record, or ID or payment details. On a veterinary practice's website, it keeps passages about health, since it can't tell an animal's health from a person's, but still leaves out topics that are only ever about people, like HIV, addiction or mental illness.

It follows robots.txt the way search engines do. Before it asks a site for anything else, it reads that site's robots.txt, and it does the same for a site a page redirects to and, before it copies a photo, for the site the photo is stored on. It follows the group of rules that names TropicArtsImporter or, if there isn't one, the rules for every crawler (User-agent: *), page by page, including Allow lines, wildcards and Crawl-delay. A site with no robots.txt is read as usual; a site whose robots.txt doesn't load, because of a server error or no answer in time, isn't read at all. To keep the importer out of your whole site while search engines still read it, add these two lines to your robots.txt. Anyone who asks to read your site is then told it can't be read, and can fill in their details by hand.

Frequently asked questions