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🧰 Make Your Website Work Harder
Published about 9 hours ago • 4 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: make your website useful, not just pretty.
A beautiful website that leaves visitors wondering what to do next is just expensive decoration. The useful ones make an offer clear, guide people toward the next step, and give your team a practical way to keep improving things after launch.
Today, I’m sharing three tools to build, prototype, and polish a website without turning every small update into a big project.
Plus: a very popular AI agent, a Google Workspace automation idea, and why a leaked driver’s license is harder to replace than a password.
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A blank website canvas is where a lot of good ideas go to die. Remixer gives you a faster starting point: describe the site or prototype you need in plain English, then refine what it builds.
It can create websites and web apps with pages, forms, a built-in database, user accounts and payments. It's offered by DreamHost, so hosting, SSL and CDN are included when you publish. The catch: AI generations, chat edits and publishing consume credits, so batch your bigger changes rather than endlessly nudging the prompt.
You can also make manual edits without using credits and connect Stripe to handle payments. Just note you can’t access the code, and content (copy) can only be edited via the AI agent.
🛠️ Alternative to: Wix, Hostinger Horizons, Lovable
Got a website idea that still lives mostly in your head? UX Pilot can turn a prompt, rough sketch, or website reference into wireframes and polished interface concepts in a hurry.
It generates multi-screen flows, high-fidelity UI, and interactive prototypes for realistic interaction, with Figma import/export and two-way sync. That makes it useful for getting something tangible in front of a client or developer before you sink weeks into the wrong direction.
Just don’t mistake the first output for finished design: check the brand details, accessibility, and whether the user journey actually makes sense. Credits can disappear quickly if you iterate heavily, too.
Adobe bills can turn a few website visuals into an unnecessarily expensive side project. Affinity, now backed by Canva, combines professional photo editing, vector design, and page layout in one desktop app (free for individuals).
That means you can make hero images, logos, social graphics, and mock-ups without bouncing between separate apps. It imports PSD, AI, and IDML files, though INDD files still cannot be opened directly. Canva AI tools are optional and require a Canva premium plan.
Public feedback often praises the capable, subscription-free toolkit, while some users flag the learning curve and Adobe-compatibility gaps.
Overall, it’s a sensible choice for freelancers and small teams who want serious visual tools without another monthly Adobe bill. If cloud collaboration or Canva AI is important, check what your Canva plan includes first.
I’ve been playing around with AI agents like Claude Code and Codex lately, but Hermes Agent caught my attention because it feels less like something you use for one project and more like an AI assistant you can slowly trust with day-to-day business tasks.
It’s an open-source AI agent that can browse the web, work with files, use your computer, remember what it learned from previous tasks (this is its USP), and even run jobs on a schedule.
Here are a few practical things you could ask it to do:
Research competitors and create a report.
Collect information from websites.
Organize files.
Fill in online forms.
Handle repetitive admin work while you focus on something else.
Compared with popular coding agents like Codex or Claude Code, Hermes isn’t primarily a coding-focused tool. Its focus is broader: it’s designed to handle general tasks and ongoing workflows. And, oddly enough, you can even use Hermes to manage Claude Code and Codex.
That’s what makes Hermes particularly interesting for freelancers and small business owners. You don’t need to be building an app to benefit from an AI agent.
And here’s the geeky bit I actually like: you’re not locked into one AI model. Hermes can work with models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, as well as open-source models – or even local ones if you need extra privacy.
Definitely one for the experimenters, but this feels much closer to the “AI employee” we’ve been promised for years.
You sit down to answer one email, and suddenly you’re hunting an invoice, nudging a reviewer, and filing three attachments. That’s exactly the kind of admin work worth handing off.
Check out Google Workspace Studio, Google’s no-code workflow builder for Workspace. Access can depend on your plan and admin settings, so begin with one small workflow and keep approvals on.
Try this:
Pick one repeat offender: invoices, content reviews, or follow-ups.
Set a trigger: a labelled Gmail message, a new Drive file, or a Sheet update.
Add one safe action: log invoice details in Sheets, remind a reviewer after two days, save attachments to Drive, or prepare a monthly-reporting draft.
Don’t automate everything. Automate the tiny jobs that keep dragging you away from the work you actually opened your laptop to do.
🍿 Plot Twist of the Week
You can reset a compromised password before your next coffee. A driver’s license number is a much harder problem to put back in the box.
That’s the grim twist in a recent breach at U.S. insurer AssuranceAmerica. Hackers accessed its systems and stole names, contact details, driver’s license numbers, and insurance-related information affecting roughly 6.9 million people, according to TechCrunch. The company said an employee was targeted, though it did not disclose the exact route in.
My takeaway: if a breach notice lands in your inbox, read it. Watch for unexpected account changes and unusually convincing phishing messages, and only upload ID when there is a clear, legitimate reason.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time: Turn happy customers into a growth channel.
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