The 4 Different Approaches to Building a Website

There are more ways to build a website today than there were just a few years ago. For a long time, the choices were fairly straightforward: use a website builder, start with a template, or have a website custom designed and developed. Those three approaches are still very much alive, and all three can be the right answer depending on what a business actually needs. But there is now a fourth option that has changed the conversation considerably: AI website builders. AI can generate website structures, layouts, content, images, code and even entire starter websites from relatively simple instructions. What once required hours of planning and development can sometimes be produced in minutes. That is a significant change, but it also creates a question that wasn’t nearly as important before: if AI can build a website, what exactly are you paying a web designer or developer to do?

The answer is more complicated than simply saying that AI will replace traditional website development. AI has changed how websites can be created, but it hasn’t eliminated the underlying decisions that make a website useful. A business still needs to understand its customers, organize its information, establish credibility, create a logical structure, make the site easy to navigate, generate conversions, compete in search and maintain the website after it launches. In other words, building the website and knowing what website should be built are still two different things. That distinction becomes much easier to understand when you look at the four primary approaches available today.

Website Builders: The Simple Starting Point

Traditional website builders are probably the most familiar option. Platforms such as Wix, Squarespace and similar services allow someone to create a website without needing to understand much about web development. You choose a starting design, add your pages, upload images, enter your content and publish the site. Much of the technical infrastructure is handled for you, which is a major part of the appeal. For a small business that simply needs a basic online presence, that can be perfectly reasonable. If you’re starting a business and need a handful of pages explaining who you are, what you do and how people can contact you, a traditional website builder can get the job done without requiring a large initial investment. Not every business needs a complicated development project just to establish a credible presence online.

The tradeoff is control. You’re generally working inside an environment that somebody else created, and that platform determines how much you can customize, which features are available, how integrations work and what happens when you need functionality outside the normal capabilities of the system. That isn’t necessarily a problem. It becomes a problem when your business grows beyond what the platform was designed to accommodate. A company might eventually need a specialized quoting system, a complicated search function, a customer portal, a database connection, an unusual ecommerce configuration or an integration with another business system. At that point, the question becomes whether the website platform can accommodate the requirement without forcing you into increasingly complicated workarounds. The website-builder approach prioritizes simplicity and convenience, and for some businesses, that’s exactly what they need. The mistake is assuming that simplicity is either universally good or universally bad. It depends entirely on the problem you’re trying to solve.

Template-Driven Websites: The Middle Ground

The second approach is a template-driven website. WordPress is a common example because it provides an enormous ecosystem of themes, frameworks, plugins and other components that can be used as the foundation for a website. The word “template” sometimes gives people the wrong impression. A template-driven website doesn’t necessarily mean someone selected a theme, changed the logo and called the job finished. There is a huge difference between using a template with almost no customization and using an established framework as the starting point for a professionally designed website. A good designer can take an existing framework and completely change the experience. Typography, colors, spacing, navigation, page structures, photography, calls to action and content organization can all be customized, while additional CSS, JavaScript, PHP, plugins and integrations can extend the functionality considerably.

This is one of the reasons template-driven websites remain popular. You don’t need to reinvent every basic component of a website. A service business still needs a navigation system. A contractor still needs service pages. A professional firm still needs information about its services and team. A real estate company still needs listings and property information. A local business still needs a way for people to find it and contact it. There is no particular advantage in custom-building every one of those basic functions simply so someone can say the website was built from scratch. The advantage comes from knowing which parts should be standardized and which parts should be customized. A well-built template-driven website can provide a very strong balance between cost, flexibility, performance and maintainability. A poorly built one can become a collection of plugins and visual compromises that becomes increasingly difficult to manage. The label doesn’t tell you everything. What matters is what was actually done with the technology.

This is also where the distinction between a cheap template website and professional Denver web design becomes important. The underlying framework is only one piece of the finished product. The architecture, content, design, performance and implementation determine what the website actually becomes. Two businesses can technically use the same WordPress theme and end up with completely different websites because the thinking and execution behind them are completely different.

Custom Websites: Building Around the Business

The third approach is custom website design and development. This is where the website is designed around the specific requirements of the business instead of beginning with a predetermined visual structure and trying to make the business fit inside it. Custom doesn’t necessarily mean that every line of code is written from scratch. It can mean a completely custom design implemented in WordPress. It can mean custom functionality added to an existing content management system. It can mean a custom application built using a development framework. It can involve databases, APIs, ecommerce systems, membership platforms, customer portals, quoting tools or other specialized functionality. The important part is that the architecture can be designed around the problem rather than forcing the problem into an existing structure.

That gives you much more control. The navigation can reflect how customers actually look for information. The content architecture can be built around the company’s services and markets. Forms can connect to the systems the business already uses. The design can be developed around the company’s brand rather than somebody else’s assumptions about what the site should look like. This can be particularly important for businesses whose websites are more than marketing brochures. If the website is connected to internal systems, manages large amounts of information, handles complicated transactions or provides functionality that doesn’t exist in an off-the-shelf platform, custom development can make considerably more sense.

But custom doesn’t automatically mean better. If a small local business needs a straightforward marketing website, building a highly customized system can introduce cost and complexity without providing meaningful benefits. The goal isn’t to build the most sophisticated website possible. The goal is to build the right website. Sometimes that means custom development. Sometimes it means WordPress with a strong framework. Sometimes it means something much simpler. The best development decision is the one that provides the capabilities the business actually needs without adding unnecessary complexity just for the sake of saying the website is custom.

AI Website Builders: The New Fourth Approach

And then there is AI. AI website builders represent a fundamentally different development experience because the starting point isn’t necessarily a human selecting a template or a developer writing code. Instead, you can describe what you want. You might tell an AI system that you’re a landscaping company serving a particular area and need a website with a homepage, service pages, testimonials, contact information and a way for customers to request an estimate. The system can generate a starting structure, create page layouts, write initial copy, select imagery, establish colors and typography, generate sections and sometimes even produce or modify the underlying code. The speed is impressive, and that speed has changed the economics of getting a website started.

A website that might previously have required significant time just to get started can now exist almost immediately. That changes what the word “building” means, but there is an important distinction between generating a website and developing a website strategy. AI can make something. That doesn’t necessarily mean it knows whether the thing it made is the right thing. An AI builder might create a perfectly reasonable homepage for a hypothetical business. It might even look better than many websites produced by inexperienced designers. But a real business isn’t hypothetical. The business has specific customers, competitors, profitable services, geographic markets, an established reputation, a particular sales process and possibly years of existing content and search visibility that need to be preserved. Those things require context, and context is where the difference between AI-assisted website creation and simply asking AI to build a website becomes important.

We’ve been exploring that distinction directly in our own work. In What Actually Happens When I Build a Website With ChatGPT, the interesting part isn’t that ChatGPT can produce things. It is how AI becomes useful when it is treated as a working tool inside an actual website project rather than as a magic button that produces a finished business. That distinction is going to become more important as AI-generated websites become increasingly common and the difference between “I have a website” and “I have an effective website” becomes even more obvious.

AI Is Extremely Good at the First Draft

One of the most useful ways to think about AI website builders is that they are exceptionally good at producing a starting point. That’s valuable. A blank screen is difficult, while a generated website gives you something to work with immediately. It can establish a structure, create placeholder content and demonstrate possibilities that would otherwise take much longer to visualize. AI can also accelerate many parts of the development process even when you’re not using a dedicated AI website builder. It can help generate code, explain code, create variations of layouts, draft content, organize information, analyze existing pages, identify technical issues and assist with repetitive development tasks. That can make a good designer or developer considerably more productive.

But there is a difference between producing more quickly and making better decisions. AI can give you ten possible homepage structures in a few minutes, but someone still has to decide which one makes sense. AI can generate a hundred paragraphs, but someone still has to determine which information is actually useful to the customer. AI can generate code, but someone still needs to determine whether that code creates a clean, maintainable and appropriate implementation. That’s why I don’t think the arrival of AI makes the other three approaches obsolete. It changes all three. The technology is becoming another tool in the development process, and the people who understand how to use that tool effectively may be able to build better websites faster than they could before.

AI Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “No Designer”

This is probably the biggest misconception surrounding AI website builders. The assumption is that if AI can create the website, there is no longer a reason to involve a designer or developer. That can be true for certain projects. If you’re comfortable doing the planning, editing, testing, troubleshooting and ongoing management yourself, an AI website builder can give you an extraordinarily fast way to create a basic website. But the more important the website becomes to the business, the more important those other activities become.

A website isn’t successful because it exists. It is successful because it accomplishes something. It communicates the business clearly, establishes trust, makes information easy to find, guides people toward the next step, works properly, loads efficiently, can be found through search, can be maintained and can evolve. AI can assist with all of those things, but it doesn’t automatically solve all of them. In fact, AI can sometimes make the problem harder because it makes it so easy to create large amounts of mediocre material. The internet doesn’t have a shortage of websites. It has a shortage of websites that actually have something useful to say.

That idea is also at the heart of Can AI Build My Website? Yes. But That’s Still the Wrong Question. The important question isn’t whether AI can technically produce the site. It obviously can. The question is what happens when the technology becomes extremely good at production while the business still needs someone to make the important decisions.

The Four Approaches Aren’t Mutually Exclusive

Here’s where the comparison gets particularly interesting. The four approaches aren’t completely separate technologies. AI can be used to create a traditional website-builder site. AI can help customize a WordPress template. AI can assist with custom development. AI can generate an entirely new website from a prompt. So AI isn’t necessarily replacing the other three categories. It is becoming a layer across website development.

That’s an important distinction. A custom developer using AI is still doing custom development. A WordPress designer using AI to accelerate coding is still building a WordPress website. A business owner using an AI website builder is taking a different approach because the AI system is doing much more of the actual construction. The technology used to create something and the architecture of the thing being created are not always the same thing, and that distinction will become increasingly important as AI becomes more capable.

What About SEO?

This is where I think business owners should be particularly careful. There is a temptation to assume that because AI can generate a website and generate content, it can also automatically create a website that performs well in Google. That’s not how SEO works. Search engines don’t reward a website simply because AI created it, and they don’t reward a website simply because it was custom coded either. What matters is the quality and relevance of the resulting experience, the technical accessibility of the site, the usefulness of its content, its authority and reputation, its structure and the many other signals search engines use to determine which results are appropriate for a particular search.

AI can absolutely help with SEO work. It can help analyze content, identify topics, organize information, assist with technical implementation and accelerate content production. But generating pages isn’t the same thing as establishing topical authority. Creating content isn’t the same thing as creating evidence. And putting keywords on a page isn’t the same thing as understanding search intent. This is particularly important for local businesses. A Denver business competing for customers in Denver doesn’t simply need a page containing the word “Denver.” It needs to establish why it is relevant to those customers, what it actually does, where it operates, why someone should trust it and what useful information it can provide. The website architecture needs to support that strategy, which is one reason I continue to think of Denver SEO and web design as connected disciplines rather than completely separate projects.

Speed Doesn’t Equal Strategy

AI has made one thing dramatically faster: production. That is genuinely important. But speed can create a dangerous illusion. If something can be produced in five minutes, it can feel like the difficult part has been solved. It hasn’t necessarily been solved.

Imagine asking AI to build a website for a law firm. It can create the pages, generate the copy, produce a professional-looking layout and even make reasonable suggestions about calls to action. But it doesn’t automatically know which areas of law are most profitable for that particular firm, which clients the firm actually wants, which geographic markets matter, what differentiates the attorneys from competitors, which claims require careful verification or what the firm’s existing reputation means for the website strategy. Those decisions existed before AI. They still exist after AI. AI simply makes it easier to move from an idea to a tangible website. That’s enormously useful. It just isn’t the same thing as having a strategy.

The Cost of Choosing the Wrong Approach

The biggest website expense isn’t always the initial development cost. Sometimes it’s having to build the same thing twice. A business can save money by choosing the cheapest possible solution and then discover eighteen months later that the website cannot support what the company has become. Now the business isn’t simply paying for a better website. It is paying to migrate content, rebuild pages, recreate functionality, replace integrations, redirect URLs, retrain staff and potentially repair SEO problems created during the transition.

That doesn’t mean you should overbuild everything from the beginning. It means you should understand the likely direction of the business before deciding how much flexibility you need. There is a big difference between building what you need today and building something that will prevent you from doing what you need tomorrow. Good web development considers both, and good website planning recognizes that a business website is likely to change considerably over its lifetime.

Which Approach Is Right for Your Business?

For a very small business that needs a basic online presence, a traditional website builder can be completely adequate. For a business that needs a professional marketing website with substantial flexibility but doesn’t need a highly specialized application, a well-designed template-driven WordPress website can be a very effective middle ground. For businesses with complex requirements, specialized functionality, significant integrations or a need for complete control over the architecture, custom development may be the better choice. And for someone who wants to create a website quickly, experiment with an idea, build a simple site or use AI as part of a broader development process, an AI website builder can be extremely useful.

There isn’t one correct answer. The right answer depends on what the website needs to accomplish. And that is the part of the conversation that often gets lost when the industry starts talking about technology. Businesses don’t actually need websites built with WordPress, Wix, custom PHP, React or AI. They need websites that solve business problems. The technology is the means of getting there.

The Most Important Question Isn’t “How Was It Built?”

The four approaches can produce dramatically different websites, but the technology itself isn’t what determines whether the website succeeds. A website builder can produce an excellent website. A template can produce an excellent website. A custom build can produce an excellent website. AI can help produce an excellent website. All four can also produce terrible websites. The difference is what happens between the idea and the finished product.

Who determines the structure? Who understands the customer? Who decides what information belongs on the site? Who develops the content? Who considers SEO? Who makes sure the design supports conversion? Who checks performance? Who tests the forms? Who maintains the site? Who decides what should happen when the business changes? Those questions matter because a website is not really a finished object. It is part of the business.

The Future Probably Isn’t AI Versus Web Designers

I don’t think the future of web design is going to be as simple as “AI replaces web designers.” A more likely future is that AI becomes part of how websites are designed and developed. Designers will use it. Developers will use it. SEO professionals will use it. Business owners will use it. Some people will use AI to build their own websites from beginning to end. Others will use AI as a tool inside a professional development process.

The distinction will increasingly be between people who use AI to produce things faster and people who understand what should be produced in the first place. That’s an important difference. AI is very good at giving you an answer. The harder skill is knowing whether you asked the right question.

That’s something we’ve seen repeatedly in web design, SEO and digital marketing. The tools change constantly. The underlying business problem doesn’t. A website still needs a purpose. It still needs an audience. It still needs a structure. It still needs useful information. It still needs credibility. And it still needs to give the visitor a reason to take the next step. AI can help build all of those things. It just doesn’t remove the need to think about them.

So, What Should You Build?

If you’re trying to decide how to build a website today, don’t start by asking which technology is the newest. Start by asking what the website needs to accomplish. If simplicity is the priority, a website builder may be enough. If you want a professional site with a strong balance of flexibility and cost, a template-driven approach may make sense. If the business has specialized requirements, custom development may be the appropriate answer. If speed, experimentation or AI-assisted creation is the priority, an AI website builder may be an excellent starting point.

And sometimes the best answer is a combination. A business might use AI to develop an initial concept, a designer to refine the user experience, WordPress as the content management system and custom development for a specific piece of functionality. That’s not a contradiction. That’s simply using the right tool for the right problem.

The website industry has changed considerably since the original version of this article was written. AI has made it possible for almost anyone to move from an idea to a functioning website much faster than before. That’s a good thing. It lowers the barrier to entry and gives businesses more options than they have ever had. But more options also make the decision more complicated. The fact that you can build a website in an afternoon doesn’t necessarily mean you should. The fact that AI can generate the design doesn’t mean the design is strategically right. The fact that a template exists doesn’t mean the site has to look like everyone else’s. And the fact that a website is custom doesn’t mean it will automatically perform better.

The real objective is much simpler: build the website that makes sense for the business. Sometimes that means using a builder. Sometimes it means using a template. Sometimes it means custom development. And increasingly, sometimes it means using AI. At Big Orange Planet, that’s how we approach web design. The technology is important, but it comes after the strategy. We start with the business, the audience, the goals and what the website actually needs to accomplish, then determine the most appropriate way to build it.

Because the best website isn’t necessarily the one built with the newest technology.

It’s the one that does its job.