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How I designed a website using AI that made my client over 3 times what she invested
InquireMy client, Sanne Frandsen, is a professor and a career coach for academics. And when we started working together, she came prepared. She had all her website copy ready, and she had the images she wanted to use, which both helped.
The goal was to design a high-converting Wix sales page so that people would sign up for her upcoming retreat. The page needed to feel both professional enough for serious academics (who were her audience) but also warm and inviting, so it didn’t feel like another average retreat for academics.
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I wanted to know how much I could get done with mostly AI. While Wix does have some AI features, at the time of publishing this, it doesn’t let you design a full page from start to finish in one go, especially when you’re working on an existing website.
You can design a website page, section by section, using AI, but honestly, I wasn’t crazy about the results I saw.
So instead, I turned to three different tools:
• Relume: to help create the retreat page structure
• ChatGPT: for brainstorming ideas
• Claude: which really surprised me
And it’s important to note that this wasn’t fully automated, I still had to make a lot of decisions and edits myself. But these tools definitely helped me get further, faster than I would have on my own.
I loved how AI helped me break through creative blocks. Normally, when I hit a wall, it can take me days to figure out how to move forward. But with AI, I could just type out my messy thoughts, get suggestions, and suddenly I had something to work with.
I experimented with both Claude and ChatGPT because I was curious which would perform better as a design assistant. To my surprise, Claude absolutely outshone ChatGPT. It gave me more creative, usable ideas to work with. The ideas weren’t perfect straight out of the box (I still had to make them better), but I was genuinely impressed. For example, here’s a mockup Claude created:
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But it was way better than I expected. Meanwhile, ChatGPT… well, we fought a lot. It needed way more prompting, way more hand-holding, and still didn’t quite get what I was going for.
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The AI-generated design wasn’t terrible. It was just…meh. When I asked for honest feedback, my client admitted she wanted something with more personality. Something that would make her feel something when she looked at it. The AI design was clean and functional, but it felt generic. Like it could be for any retreat, anywhere, run by anyone.
I designed something that felt more warm, a boho-style retreat page that actually matched the energy she wanted. This was how a part of the design looked:
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She was so much more excited about the final version. And in her own words: “The wix website looks great and I am very proud of it.““
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View it here: https://www.sannefrandsen.com/retreat
Within two months, she had already made back three times what she invested, even before filling all her spots for the retreat which is pretty exciting.
I’ll be completely honest: AI did save me weeks of work. What would’ve been a three-week project took just one. For the boring parts like initial layouts and structure, it was actually amazing.
But it wasn’t GREAT. You still have to do a lot of thinking and sprinkle in creativity to end up with something that looks AMAZING rather than just basic. Which is not a bad thing, AI shouldn’t replace thinking anyway.
That said, when it comes to the topic of AI, I do have mixed feelings because in a society that values profit over people, AI can easily become a tool for companies looking to replace human workers.
Duolingo just recently made headlines for deciding to phase out contractors in favor of AI and I’m sure more companies are headed down the same path.
This is capitalism at its finest: using AI to cut costs at the expense of human workers. It’s frustrating, and honestly, it sucks.But here’s where I’ve landed after this: AI makes a fantastic sidekick when it’s not being used to replace people.
I think there’s a specific group of people who will benefit massively from AI design tools: people just starting out who don’t have a budget to hire a designer or simply want to do it themselves. This is actually great for non-designers because something that might have taken 6 months to figure out can now be done in weeks or even days.
After seeing some AI-generated websites, I’m noticing they all look and sound pretty similar. So it won’t work for people who want something truly unique, bold, or unconventional.And surprisingly, it also makes the same mistakes beginners do. If you’re not sure what to ask for or what actually makes a design work or convert, AI will give you something that looks nice, but has problems under the surface.And from my experience, it doesn’t tell you that, so you won’t even know something’s wrong, you’ll just wonder why your website isn’t converting.
For projects where AI use is welcomed, I’ll be incorporating it into my process, but as an assistant, not a replacement. I’ll use it for the things it’s good at (getting past creative blocks, doing all the boring stuff) while still bringing my human creativity to the table.But I’ll also use it cautiously because, with how quickly things are evolving in tech, who knows what the future holds? I’m hopeful that the future is bright, but only time will tell.
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