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🧰 3 New Ways to Build Your Site Today
Published about 21 hours ago • 6 min read
🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.
Hola friend 👋,
I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.
This week: creating websites just got a whole lot easier… and quicker.
For years, website builders have been a go-to for anyone who doesn't code. But now, AI is speeding things up even more. You can get custom designs in seconds, build almost any feature you can imagine, and even generate all your copy and images with a simple prompt.
It's a huge time-saver.
We’re moving beyond basic templates. Today, I’m sharing three tools that are genuinely changing how we build sites: from a full-on AI web app builder to a design‑first platform for creating truly scroll‑stopping sites.
Plus: a powerful tool for the more technically adventurous, a smart hack to add custom features to any website builder, and a plot twist from the world of AI video.
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I’m a big fan of traditional website builders, but getting a truly unique site out of them takes time. And in the end, most of them still feel a bit templated – which makes sense, because you’re starting from templates.
That’s where Horizons really stands out. They’ve built something like a ChatGPT-style assistant that specializes in website and app design and plugs directly into their hosting. The result: you can spin up a unique site just by writing prompts and have it online in minutes.
And if you want to go further and build something closer to a full web app than a simple website, Horizons can handle that too (something traditional website builders simply can’t do).
For example, you could:
Create an on-brand site by prompting Horizons and uploading your brand guidelines
Have it analyze your existing website, social posts, or other content to build context and nail the copy
Build more complex app-like features without code, such as a members-only area with logins and payments for exclusive content.
I’ve used it quite a bit myself (for example, to build a lead-magnet web app), and the results were impressive. Just keep in mind you’ll still need some back-and-forth to tweak and test everything before publishing (AI does make mistakes).
If you find WordPress a bit clunky and not very "visual," you’ll want to check out Framer. It feels less like a traditional website builder and more like a design tool, similar to Figma or Photoshop, but for creating fully functional websites. And of course, AI is built in, so the whole site‑creation process is much faster than it used to be.
I was blown away by the design freedom. You can drag, drop, and animate nearly every pixel to create stunning, unique layouts. It also comes with a rich library of pre-built templates, sections, and elements like cookie banners and icons, which makes the whole process feel incredibly polished and professional.
That said, it isn't completely beginner-proof. You'll need a bit of an eye for design and some digital know-how to get the most out of it. It’s perfect for freelancers creating sites for clients, small teams, or startups that want a bold online presence.
Claude Code is not a website builder, but it's so powerful that you could argue it's like having your own web developer working for you 24/7 (as long as you have AI tokens left). It can generate the complete code for your website and then connect it to a hosting service.
This approach gives you incredible flexibility. You can ask Claude to create a portfolio, a blog, or a landing page, and it will write the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for you. It can even build apps, like this one my colleague Inka built that suggests books based on your next travel destination. It's great because it uses your computer's resources to access more tools (e.g. scrape sites, extract information, resize images, generate copy with your style, etc.) and design a custom site for you in no time.
You could also tackle very complex projects, like using a CMS such as WordPress for your site, or building advanced web apps and replicating anything you want – e.g. I've created a copycat of Semrush that lives on a hosting service, pulls data from DataforSEO, and saves me big money in subscriptions.
The best part is that you're not locked into any platform's ecosystem, you can move your site to any host (e.g. Hostinger) you like. But it's a fair bit more hands-on than a traditional AI site builder.
🛠️ Alternative to: WordPress, coding it yourself, Codex
Apify is a bit of a geeky tool, but it's incredibly powerful if you know how to use it. In simple terms, it’s a platform that lets you automate tasks on the web and extract data from any website. Think of it as a supercharged web scraper that can do almost anything you can imagine. And you don’t even need to create the scripts yourself, as other users build them and you just pay to use them (although of course, you could create your own too 🤓).
So, how does it work? You can use it to monitor social media for specific keywords, take screenshots of websites automatically, or even pull business information from directories like Google Maps or TripAdvisor. This is super useful if you're trying to find leads for your business or keep an eye on your competitors.
While it can be a bit technical, you don’t have to be a developer to use it. Because it has an API, I’ve been connecting it to AI apps like Claude Code. By giving more tools and data to Claude, it can deliver better content and help me save a ton of time.
🛠️ Alternative to: n8n, creating your own solution, SaaS tools
Ever feel like your website builder is missing that one feature you desperately need? Instead of switching platforms or installing clunky plugins that slow down your site, you could consider adding custom features using AI-generated code.
This works best for small, self-contained features rather than full web apps. Think things like price calculators, quiz-style forms, interactive FAQs, newsletter signup forms, or simple widgets like countdown timers, testimonials, and comparison tables.
Here’s how to do it:
Find your feature: Create a small brief with the description of the feature you need. You can also include a screenshot or a screen recording if that’s easier for you.
Ask the AI: Go to an AI tool like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT and ask it to turn your design or screenshot into a single block of code (HTML, CSS, and JS).
Copy and paste: Most site builders have a custom code block. Simply drag it onto your page and paste the code inside.
Tweak it: Preview the result and ask the AI to make changes until it’s perfect.
It’s a simple trick that gives you the power to create any simple custom feature you can imagine without ever leaving your favorite builder.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
OpenAI shut down the Sora app, the short-form AI video platform that went viral last fall. That’s a pretty wild twist: one of the biggest AI names in the world tried to build a TikTok-style video product, sparked a wave of deepfake anxiety, partnered with Disney, and then pulled the plug a few months later.
The app was using OpenAI's text-to-video model, and its sudden shutdown has left many wondering what happened behind the scenes. According to reports, OpenAI decided to end the partnership to focus on its own internal development. You can read more about the story here.
I suppose it’s safe to say that for now social media projects using AI as the main content creation platform, aren’t really developing much. But will this change?
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, I’ll share 3 unexpected tools I use almost every day.
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