Democratizing Personal Website Creation: an AI-Driven Approach for Effortless, Cost-Efficient, and High-Quality Web Page Generation

The Project

There has always been a high barrier of entry to programming a website. With such a variety of developmental tools and languages, each taking years to learn, one finds themselves at a roadblock as to how to start learning. Even when one hires professional developers to do the job for them, it costs money and so the services are inaccessible to the masses. Website builders such as Wix and Wordpress have traditionally been the tools that make the website-building experience accessible to everyone, but many of the features they offer are often locked behind paywalls and their services can quickly become complicated to use. The website builders also may not have the ability to modify the website infrastructure or source code, which results in limited changes in functionality for the end user. Our solution is to offer a free tool that allows users to generate a blog-style website with the backing of modern AI tools. Given user input for the topic, pattern, and any specific website alterations (demands), one can generate a full html website in a matter of seconds. By creating an HTML website, and with the usage of demands, one can easily create a great website as well as watch how the HTML changes with each subsequent request. This method of generation is often easier than specifying in a tool what one wishes to build, since any alterations can be explained technically or in terms that are not as technical; both go as words into an AI that will parse it into code. As such the method can tolerate both the new and advanced user, a degree of flexibility not offered in other methods. It also solves the aforementioned problem of accessibility of source code, since the HTML file is directly provided to the user. To a new user, this can be a good way to jumpstart learning how to code by seeing how a change in demand affects the end result of the website as well as the HTML changes involved.

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Team Comments

I chose to make this project after seeing how hard it is to get into web development from my own experiences and subsequently wanting to make it easier for others to get into web development themselves.

One major challenge of the program is the quality of the AI generation. Both the text and image generation models are using the neural networks, which is a black-box system. It means the output of the models is not explainable, which makes it hard to debug.

If I had more time, I would add features for generating JavaScript and better CSS into the system. This would have made the websites much more interactive and provided a better starting point for aspiring programmers.