Building marketing sites with AI

As part of learning to build with AI, I designed and developed several marketing sites for friends and family businesses. I started with Karuna's spiritual practice. I'd built her first site in Webflow seven years ago but wasn't happy with the results and lacked the skills to improve it. With AI, I could finally solve this problem and move her off Webflow's $18 monthly hosting to free Vercel hosting given her low traffic.

Karuna Gatton's site was an experiment. While she loves how it looks and has gained clients from it, there's room for improvement. It needs a proper Sanity CMS, better Tailwind implementation, and has some duplicated components.

The second site was for Department of Art (DOA), a test of different questions. A close friend referred me to them, and the project would help me understand how much work a client site from scratch would take and whether I could deliver quality that would typically require significant time or team size. Plus, they have a great established brand and deliver excellent work with a bit of fun. This would be enjoyable.

The answer to all my questions was yes. I delivered DOA's marketing site in about two weeks of work spread over a couple months. The site has a fully built-out Sanity CMS for content management, a clean and extensible design system, and excellent Lighthouse scores.

Next was a site for an old friend whose website, name, and brand I'd helped create five years ago. It was for an accounting consultancy called Opal Creek. Given what I'd learned from DOA and Karuna's sites, I built their new version with Sanity CMS in under a week. My familiarity with their brand and business, combined with my experience in Next.js and Sanity, made the process quick. The CEO is currently working with his team to flesh out the content before launch. Fingers crossed it goes live this year.

TThe latest site is this one. It's a few levels up in complexity and has been an excellent learning experience. I'll share those learnings in a future post.