How to Create a Site With the Durable AI Website Builder

Visual website builders have allowed folks who don't have a lot of time or technical expertise to create sites without code for two decades. AI can make it even easier, allowing you to create a website customized for your brand in minutes.

In this step-by-step guide, I’ll show you how to create a website with Durable, an AI website builder. We’ll look at how to generate your site, customize the AI-generated content, create your own content and test everything to ensure your site is fully functional before release.

What is Durable and why should you use it for website creation?

James Martin/CNET

Durable is a website builder that can create a website for you in approximately 5 minutes or less once you've entered some simple information about your business. This is similar to most AI-powered website builders, but Durable takes it further in two key ways:

• Automatically populating new sections like text blocks you add to the website.
• Offering automated page templates that include AI-generated text and images to get you started.

All of Durable’s auto-generated text is customized to your business and built on basic SEO -- search engine optimization -- principles. This means the content uses keywords relevant to your business, like “marketing” and “Canada,” to help you rank well in search engines. You’ll still want to customize it to better represent exactly what you do, but this can be a great starting point.

Durable also offers a variety of other AI-powered business tools, including:

• Brand identity: Durable can instantly choose fonts and colors based on basic information like your industry and brand name. You can also use Durable to create a logo.
• Marketing: The Durable website builder includes extensive tools for SEO. There’s also a blog post generator that can help you create articles.
• Customer Relationship Management: Automated tools for organizing contacts.
• Invoicing: Tools for automatically generating and sending invoices so you can get paid faster.

These tools make it easy to build and manage an online business. They’ll also integrate directly with your Durable-generated website so you’ll be able to do everything from one account.

A note about using generative AI

Most generative AI is trained by scraping content from the web, often without permission from -- or compensation for -- the creators. Many folks believe using AI is unethical for this reason and may even distrust brands using AI. There are also potential legal concerns, with multiple ongoing lawsuits against AI companies, including a lawsuit against Stable Diffusion. You can’t copyright purely AI-generated content without any human authorship at this time, either.

If you want to avoid these concerns, or you’re worried about the enormous amount of power and water AI uses, you can manually create a site using one of the best website builders for small businesses instead. These tools are built for beginners who want to build a site without code, so you don’t need to worry about learning web development or complex technical processes to use them.

How to create a website using Durable

Generating your site

Start by telling Durable the type of business you’re building. Be specific, as Durable will use this to generate content for your site, and the quality of this content depends on the amount of information it has. For example, if you’re a marketing consultant, you might list the type of marketing you specialize in (like “digital marketing” or “social media marketing”). This should give you better results than just saying “marketing”.

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Next, you’ll need to tell Durable your business’s location and name. These will be used to optimize your auto-generated content for SEO. You can leave the location blank if you’re primarily running your business online, but Durable recommends against this because local SEO can be a powerful tool for attracting customers.

Once you’ve submitted your information, Durable will generate your site. The whole process typically takes less than 5 minutes and gives you a basic yet attractive website populated with text and images relevant to your business.

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Customizing website design with Durable

Next, you can modify your site’s overall layout, color schemes and fonts/typography to better match your vision.

Overall layout and color schemes

Click the Customize link near the top left corner to view a drop-down menu containing options for editing the overall appearance of your site.

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To change the entire layout of your site, click Change Template, then pick a design from the template library. Your content will automatically be mapped to the new template. Or click Regenerate to have Durable build a wholly new site.

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If you’re happy with the layout but want the color scheme to match your brand better, open the Customize menu and click Colors. You can then choose from a range of premade color palettes or create a custom palette to match your brand identity.

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Font and typography

Return to the Customize menu and click Fonts. There are several premade font packs you can choose between.

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Once you’ve selected a font pack, click over to the Custom area to change things like font size. You can also switch out your header or body text font here for an even more unique look.

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Creating web content using Durable tools

Next, you’ll want to create text, images and other content for your website. There are two ways to do this: modifying placeholder content and adding new content. You can also create new pages, which you can then populate with more new content.

Modifying placeholder content

Click on any placeholder content to open a sidebar with editing options. If you select your site banner, for example, you’ll see options for changing the text and image. You can either manually edit the placeholders or ask Durable to create something new by clicking Regenerate.

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There are a few modifications you can make to improve your site’s effectiveness:

• Replace AI-generated images with high-resolution images of your products, workspace or team. This makes your site feel more authentic and unique, giving visitors a direct connection to your brand.
• Replace placeholder text to focus on exactly what you do. Sticking with the digital marketing example, you might replace “drive growth and success” with “boost your search engine rankings to connect with more customers”.
• Remove location references if you plan to operate entirely online and work with international clients.
• Replace placeholder social proof with real testimonials from your customers. If you don’t have any customers yet, delete these sections. Having no reviews is better than faking them.

Creating new content

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Hold your mouse over any area of the page to see an Add Section option. Clicking on this reveals numerous options, including banners, sections for displaying your services and reviews/testimonial blocks. You can also click Content, which lets you add elements like text, multimedia text/image blocks and FAQ sections.

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Creating pages

Click on Pages > Create New at the top of the page to see Durable’s page templates, then choose the type of page you want to make. Durable will generate it for you, including placeholder content, within a few minutes. Alternatively, you can create a blank page and manually add sections.

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Depending on your site, your website might include the following pages:

• Products and services page to showcase what you’re selling. Include unique images and text that showcase your business -- and the benefits of buying from you -- where possible.
• Testimonials and reviews page where you display feedback from your customers. You can skip this if you don’t have any yet, but make sure you’re asking for reviews and testimonials so you can create this page sooner rather than later.
• About page where you share information about your business and the people who work with you. Provide information about why you started your business, what your business aims to do and any qualifications you have to run your business.
• Contact Us page where you include a contact form, email address and phone number. You can also include a physical address and a map if your business has a physical location that’s open to the public.
• Blog or news page where you publish important updates and other announcements. You may also want to publish informational posts related to your business, like tutorials for performing basic marketing tasks, to showcase your expertise.
• Newsletter page where people can subscribe to your email list.
• Privacy policy to let visitors know how their data will (and won’t) be collected.

Durable has templates for most of these pages, so you can customize the content to match your business.

Pro tip: The menu will display pages in the order you created them. There’s no easy way to change this order, so create your pages in the order you want them to appear.

Publish your website

You’re almost ready to publish your site! There are just a few things you’ll want to do first:

• Preview your site on mobile: Turn on the preview feature in the top right to see what your site will look like on desktops, tablets and smartphones. Adjust elements that aren’t showing up how you want them to on smaller screens. 58.21% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, so you don’t want to skip this step!
• Check your placement: Make sure all of your text, images and interactive elements are where you want them to be. Remember to place the most essential items, like calls to action, where visitors can spot them immediately.
• Check your work: Reread all of the text on your site, looking for spelling and grammar errors. You can also read it out loud to get a feel for the flow of the text, making changes every time you trip over words or find yourself wanting to use a different word from what’s on the page.
• Check your links: Make sure every link leads to the page it’s supposed to link to. 

You’ll also need to buy a premium Durable plan. These plans start at $12 a month (billed annually) for unlimited storage and bandwidth. They also include a domain name and, unlike most other hosting services, the domain is free as long as you maintain your Durable subscription instead of only for the first year.

Optimizing website performance with Durable

Make sure your site is working the way it’s supposed to before you start marketing so that when you do, the visitors who arrive will stick around (and hopefully buy something, too). There are two steps to this process: testing and optimization.

Testing your website

You should test your site in three ways:

• Use it yourself: Log out of your account (or use a different browser) and interact with your site like a visitor would. Does it look good? Can you find everything easily? Do all navigation links and other interactive elements, like call-to-action buttons, work?
• Ask others to use it: Ask friends, family or colleagues to visit your site and give you their overall impression of its appearance and functionality. There’s a good chance they’ll notice things you won’t. You can also give them a questionnaire to guide the feedback process.
• Run performance tests: Improving your site speed is essential because bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave your site after visiting just one page) increases by 32% when loading times go from one to three seconds. I use WebPageTest because it can test site speeds for different locations and devices.

Pro tip: Run these tests at least once a year after you’ve published your site (and any time you’re making major changes). This may help you improve your site over time.

Optimizing your website

There are several ways to optimize your site before you start promoting it:

• Fix any issues you (or your testers) noticed. Use the notes you created during the testing process (or received from your testers) to correct spelling, fix broken links and move content around so the site experience flows better.
• Follow any suggestions from your speed test results. You may need to watch tutorials or contact customer service for complicated fixes.
• Optimize all of your images. Use either PNG files or WebP files for all of your pictures. I also resize my images (sticking with a maximum width of 1,800 to 2,000 pixels) and sometimes run them through an image compression tool like TinyPNG.
• Run your tests again. This will ensure that you’ve caught most of the errors and anything that’s slowing your site down.

Keep testing until everyone -- you, your testers and your speed testing tool -- agrees that your site is in tip-top shape. When there are no more errors to catch, you’re ready to start promoting your site!

Squarespace: An alternative to Durable

If you’re not happy with what you’ve seen in this tutorial or you can’t get your Durable site to match your exact vision, consider using a different AI builder. I recommend Squarespace for two reasons:

• Collaborative AI process: Instead of spitting out a site based on two or three pieces of information, Squarespace lets you choose key elements like your color scheme and fonts up front. You’ll also get opportunities to change various aspects of the design during the site generation process. This lets you create something that matches your vision right out of the gate.
• More advanced site editor: Squarespace offers more design options than the Durable editor. These include more control over content placement, a wider range of preformatted content blocks and menu customization tools.

You’ll pay a little bit more -- $16 a month (billed annually) instead of $12 a month -- but the improved design experience makes it well worth the increased cost.

Final thoughts on building a website with Durable

Durable’s robust website and content generation tools make it easy to create your entire website in under an hour, no code required. You can regenerate every element as many times as you want and manually customize anything you’re not happy with -- and there’s no code or technical experience required at any stage of this process.

If you wish to make a truly effective website, however, you’ll want to follow some best practices. Adding your own images, reviews, testimonials and content showing potential customers how you work goes a long way toward building trust with your visitors. You’ll also want to run at least two rounds of tests -- and get feedback from trusted friends or family -- to ensure your website is working the way you want it to before you publish.