You would expect a senior web developer like me to be against simple, no-code, AI driven website builders, since I work as the human who does the same thing, takes verbal instructions and translates them into websites. I recieved an email from a hosting company I use regularly for clients today about a new offering they have called Coderick. The marketing email had zero technical information in it, always a bad sign, but that’s understandable given who their target audience is. I did a little digging.
Here are the things I look for as red flags when I look at a site builder tool promoted by a hosting company. Actually, here is the one thing:
Lack of portability.
Can I move the site I build somewhere else, or am I locked into this host forever, held hostage by a website I’ve built search engine ranking with or like at least some features of?
Speed and Effort
Coderick has some advantages, firstly that it is build directly in HTML, CSS and JS, likely resulting in a fast, clean site. It claims to build a complete website using just your prompts. If that works for you, great. If it doesn’t, ‘all’ you will have lost is a bunch of time learning something that doesn’t work for you.
Holding your work hostage or abandoning it
The main disadvantage, however, is a doozy. You can’t see, export or use the underlying html on other hosts. This means that if the AI isn’t doing what you want, you can’t just nip into the html and fix it, and most importantly for the hosting company, you can’t move somewhere else, even if they jack up your hosting costs or go out of business.
I have seen this with other website builders promoted by hosting companies, and the top problems I’ve experienced are this one with the lack of portablilty (Squarespace, coderick, Shopify), but often you get lack of ability to back up your site in case it gets hacked (Squarespace), or you forget to pay your bill and the host deletes it (I’ve seen it happen many times), or the hosting company stops supporting the proprietary web builder they chose, so after awhile you are stuck with a website not meeting modern standards, that you can’t update (Basekit, Goddaddy site builder, Homestead, AOL hometown, Yahoo SiteBuilder and many more).
Open Source Advantages
This is why I choose robust open source platforms like WordPress, which are continually maintained by more than one stakeholder and have thousands of open source programmers continually adding functionality. Almost all web hosts worldwide support WordPress websites, so if you don’t like your host, or it goes out of business you can continue somewhere else. You can back your website up using a wide variety of tools, and if you want to use AI tools there are ones that integrate with it.
Am I better than AI? Yes, I think so, because I not only receive my clients instructions, I interpret them within a web of decades of experience in a variety of web technologies, marketing strategies, and human interface design, and advise my clients on what will meet not just their stated goals, but the ones in the background they have not yet articulated, and ones I expect they will want or need but did not know were possible. I make sites that are portable, layperson-editable, and flexible to the pivots businesses need to make frequently in these times.
I am happy to talk over text or phone about your project. I hope you will be in touch.
