The Idea In a Nutshell

  • I’m currently involved in consulting on a range of AI projects; building 3 chatbots.
  • The point of the 3 chatbots I am building is to explore the most effective ways to commercialize some aspects of AI.
  • As part of that work, I used an AI website builder to construct the WordPress site I need for the Interview Bot we are building.
  • The process of using the site was interesting and extremely effective. 
  • It was also very cheap, scalable (you can add more sites on different domains in the same place) and fast, particularly compared to alternatives.
  • The implications are similar to the propagation of other AI technology solutions which are rippling through the market and the world at the moment. 

Building Chatbot Solutions Is Hard at The Moment

I’ve written before about how hard it was to find developers who actually knew how to build chatbots. It’s a bit of a Wild West experience. A lot of the developers I spoke with said they had used the new technology involved and done exactly the same job that I was requesting, previously. In reality the 2 I worked with initially, struggled. I guess they were looking to get me to pay to practice with them. To be expected. 

My experience With Developer Contractors is That:

  • What they charge actually has little to do with the quality of work they produce:
    Whether they charge $25 or $100 per hour, the quality of the work is largely the same.  
  • Eastern Block is best:
    My personal experience has been best with developers from the Eastern Block. I’ve found them generally reasonable, honest and straightforward in their dealings.
  • The way they deal with you initially is how they’re going to deal with you all the time:
    However much I hoped that supporting them and working with them to fix issues which arose while we were building the bots, the developers which weren’t initially honest turn out not to be honest in the end and the ones which missed deadlines at first went on to miss multiple deadlines later.  

Even for basic elements of the work, like building a WordPress site to give me a CMS I could use, I got quotes in the region of $700-$800! That’s just the basic WordPress site we needed. A different guy told me it would take him 2 days to fit a plugin to an existing WordPress site. Not very truthful.

Using An AI Website Builder to Develop Version 1 of the WordPress Site I Needed For Interview Bot

Both of the initial, failed engagements with developers added up to an expensive process, in terms of both money and time. As a result, I realized I had to explore ways to reduce the costs of what I was trying to achieve. 

In the end, as an experiment as much as anything, we used a website builder to generate version one of the WordPress site we needed. 10web (the service we used) was remarkable. I’m not a technical person by any stretch and it took literally 5 minutes to figure the tool and build the site. It also cost $10.


I was offered a quote of several hundred AUD to build a WordPress site to host my chatbot. In the end, I used an AI website builder called 10web which did it in 5 minutes for $10 USD. 

Automatically Generated Content Including Imagery

The first version needed work but for a 5 minute build time, I was prepared to do it. The experience was very, very easy. The website it produced also came pre-populated with chatbot images and chatbot related content. Just a starting point for what we ultimately needed and would end up with but it was useful to see the populated site, even if we ended up rewriting a lot of it.

Impressively, 10web produced images and content for the first version of the site based simply on my prompt.

Its Not Like Version 1 Of The WordPress Site Was Perfect…..

On the negative side, 10web offered me a free trial and then 20 minutes later I got an email saying they’d charged me $120 USD for the site and hosting for a year. I daresay I’ll be able to get a refund if I cancel in the first week (which was the marketing promise they advertised.) I guess I have some sympathy with a startup trying to convert as many customers in to paying visits as possible.

I think AI generated content is going to raise the bar for what we see and read on sites. The first version generated by these AI tools removes some of the legwork for high quality content writers but when I think of some of the best I know at content generation, e.g.. Finder.com.au, there’s no way they’d let the content like the first version lose on their site. It’s just not high quality enough. Similarly images (as opposed to text content). 

New Tools Like This Are Both A Push And A Pull For Developers – And All Of Us

We’ve been told to look forward to productivity benefits and, of course, fear unemployment from Artificial Intelligence. This experiment with using AI to build a website to help me sell AI services showed the potential for both. Developers quoting $700 to deliver a site are now (or will very soon become) replaced by a single line prompt, automation and a $10 a month bill. 

Like all of us, developers are going to have to figure out the skills required to use these new tools and how to integrate AI services like chatbots in to them, to add value, since the relatively simple end of what they used to do is now quickly becoming automated by services like 10web. The same could be said of elements of my job and for designers and other white collar workers whose work can now be delivered by AI services.  

And of course these are only version 1 tools. Where will we be in a year from now? It’s taken me 2 months in the Wild West to produce what I thought was literally the easiest chatbot imaginable. For example, I suspect that, in a year, if you ask your AI website designer simply to add a chatbot to your site, it’ll do it.