AI website design, minus the hand‑waving
Ask ten companies what an “AI website” is and you will get ten answers, most of them attached to something they want to sell you. This page is the plain version: what AI genuinely does in a website build, what it still cannot do, what each route costs, and how to tell the difference before you pay for one.
Techno Goober has been building websites out of Lewes, Delaware since 2012, for clients here and nationwide.
Three different things get called “an AI website”
They are not variations on one product. They are three different deals, with three different amounts of work left over for you.
A DIY builder with AI bolted on
Wix, Squarespace, Hostinger, Durable and the rest. You answer a few questions, a template comes back filled in, and from that moment the job is yours — the copy, the photos, the SEO, the forms, the updates, forever. It is cheap per month and it is genuinely fine if you enjoy that work.
Most people who call us have already tried this one.
An AI-assisted build, done for you
A person decides what the site says, what it sells and how it is laid out. AI does the production underneath: page structure, markup, first drafts, alt text, schema, image variations, the repetitive parts that used to eat most of a build budget.
You get a finished website at a fixed price. This is what we do, and it is why our sites start at $999 instead of several thousand.
Generated and shipped unread
The same tools as the middle option with the review step taken out, because the review step is the expensive bit. It is fast and it is cheap.
It is also how a live website ends up claiming twenty years in business when you have been open for three, listing hours you do not keep, or carrying a contact form that goes nowhere. Nobody advertises this option. Plenty of people are selling it.
The tell Ask any company you are considering who reads the site before it goes live, and what happens if something on it turns out to be wrong. A real answer names a person and a process. A vague one is the answer.
What AI is actually good at, and what it is still bad at
We use these tools every day. This is what a year of doing it has taught us, rather than what the marketing says.
Good at — the production work
- Building the thing. Clean, fast, mobile-first HTML in a fraction of the hours it used to take.
- First drafts. A page of copy to react to beats a blank page, and reacting is much faster than starting.
- The boring completeness. Alt text, meta descriptions, headings, schema and redirects on every page instead of the first six.
- Repetition without drift. The same pattern across forty pages, done the same way on page forty as on page one.
- Reading fast. Auditing a site, a competitor set or a pile of reviews far quicker than a person can.
Still bad at — the deciding
- Knowing which service pays your bills. It will give all six equal billing. Your business does not.
- Knowing whether a claim is true. It will write “family owned since 1998” with total confidence and no idea.
- Sounding like you. Default AI voice is competent and completely forgettable. That is a problem when three competitors used the same tool.
- Knowing what to leave out. It adds. Good pages are mostly the result of cutting.
- Taste, and local context. It has never driven past your shop, met your customers or read the site of the competitor two towns over.
Which is the whole argument in one line: the machine is very good at the half of the job that used to cost the most, and no good at all at the half that decides whether the website works. We charge for the second half and let the first one get cheap. The long version of how we use these tools, including the unflattering parts, is on How we use AI.
A DIY AI builder vs. having one built
Six questions that decide which one you actually want. There is a right answer for some businesses on each side.
Who decides what it says?
Builder: you do, in a form, and the model fills the gaps with plausible guesses.
Built for you: we do, after asking you what actually sells and what you keep having to explain on the phone.
Who checks it before it is live?
Builder: you, and only if you know what to look for.
Built for you: a Goober reads every page, then you approve it. Nothing goes live on a model’s say-so.
What do you pay?
Builder: a low monthly fee, plus your own hours — which are not free, they are just invisible.
Built for you: a fixed price, quoted before we start, from $999.
What happens when you need a change?
Builder: you log in and do it, whenever you get to it.
Built for you: depends which build you pick — on the $999 site we handle changes for you; on the WordPress builds you edit it yourself.
Who owns it?
Builder: you rent it. Stop paying and the site goes with it; moving it elsewhere usually means rebuilding.
Built for you: it is your site and your domain. You can take it with you.
What does year three look like?
Builder: whatever you have kept up with. Usually the hours ran out around month four.
Built for you: a care plan from $50/month keeps it patched, backed up and current, or you handle it yourself.
If you have the time and you like fiddling with it, a builder is a perfectly good answer and we will tell you so. If the website has been on your to-do list for eight months, that is the answer already.
What an AI-assisted build costs here
Three routes, priced before you start. The difference between them is not how good the site is — it is who edits it afterwards.
$999
A fast, hand-checked HTML site, live in about a week. No dashboard to learn — when you need a change, you ask and it gets done.
The honest bit: you cannot edit it yourself at 11pm. Some people want that; some people hate it.
See what’s included$1,750
WordPress with content blocks, about two weeks. You log in and edit text and images yourself, inside a layout that cannot easily be broken.
The honest bit: a CMS is a thing to keep updated. That is what care plans are for.
Compare the builds$2,500
Full drag-and-drop control, about three weeks. Move sections, build new pages, change layouts without calling anyone.
The honest bit: more freedom means more ways to make it look worse. It comes with training.
Compare the buildsAn online store is an add-on from $500. Care plans start at $50/month. Monthly SEO, which includes AI search work at no extra charge, starts at $750/month on a six-month minimum. Everything we publish a price for is on the pricing page; anything genuinely bespoke gets quoted rather than guessed at.
Does an AI-built site still get found?
Google does not rank pages on how they were produced. It has no way to know and no reason to care. It ranks them on whether they load fast, answer the thing the person searched for, and are backed by a real business it can verify elsewhere.
What does get punished is thin, generic, interchangeable content — and that is a very common outcome of unread AI output, which is why the two get confused. The problem is not the machine. The problem is publishing the first draft.
The newer half of the question is AI search: whether ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and the rest name you when someone asks for a business like yours. The work that earns those mentions is unglamorous — correct schema, listings that agree with each other everywhere, real reviews, and pages that answer the actual question rather than circling it. We do that work as part of monthly SEO at no extra charge.
The limit, stated plainly: there is no submission form for AI answers and no ranking to buy. Nobody can promise you a citation. We do the work that earns them and report honestly on whether it is landing.
The things people ask before they commit
Something not covered here? Call 302-645-7177 or send it over — we don’t bite.
Ask us your questionNot if a person is doing the deciding. The sameness people notice in AI sites comes from accepting the default — default layout, default stock photography, default reassuring paragraph about quality and service. We start from your business rather than from the template, and the layout, the photos and the order of the page are choices somebody made on purpose. Have a look at the work and judge for yourself.
Yes — every page, before you ever see it, and again before it goes live. That review is the thing you are buying; the production underneath it is the part that got cheap. If the AI gets something wrong, it is our job to catch it, not yours to find out about from a customer.
That is exactly what the three prices are about. The $999 HTML site has no dashboard — you ask for a change and we make it. The $1,750 WordPress build lets you edit text and images inside a layout that holds its shape. The $2,500 Beaver Builder build gives you drag-and-drop control over everything, with training so you use it. Pick the one that matches how much you actually want to touch it.
Yes. Name a page, a post or an image and we will tell you straight how it was produced. We publish the whole policy on How we use AI, including where your information goes and what we cannot promise.
It is cheap because the slow part stopped being slow. A build used to be dominated by hours of production — cutting a design into markup, writing the same six kinds of page again, hand-keying alt text and schema. That work is now a fraction of what it was. The judgment, the review and the sitting down with you did not get faster and we did not cut them. What you lose at $999 is not quality; it is the dashboard and the bespoke design work.
Usually the honest answer is that rebuilding is cheaper than repairing, because those platforms do not let anyone else in to work properly and the content rarely survives the move intact. Send us the address and we will tell you which it is, including if the answer is “leave it alone, it is doing its job”. Your domain is yours either way.
Where to go from here
The $999 website
What is included, what it looks like, and how a week-long build actually runs.
All three builds, compared
HTML, WordPress and Beaver Builder side by side, with timelines and what each one needs from you.
How we use AI
The full disclosure — what the tools touch, where your information goes, and what we will not promise.