How I Make Expensive Looking AI Built Sites

A couple years ago, a simple website with shadcn was enough.

That’s all that was needed to look premium.

Now, every second website you look at looks exactly the same.

I’m rebuilding my personal website using AI.

This is how I make those outputs look more premium.

Before touching anything, I always define my palette.

Don’t let AI choose this for you.

And don’t do this after the fact, it’s a lot harder to clean up after.

Premium sites feel consistent on purpose.

Everything has been thought out and everything is unified.

This is the easiest step and most important step.

A premium site. Every detail feels thought out.

This is the single most important thing to focus on.

And performance matters greatly here.

If you’re loading a full video or heavy animation, there’s a trick.

Serve a lightweight static version of the hero with text for the browser immediately.

This is good for SEO and for speed.

Spend most of your time at the start on this. This is the building block for the rest of your site to look premium.

A bad hero will lead you to making a bad website.

If you don’t have an idea of how the motion should work.

Then I’d recommend having a look at examples, you can go to awwwards.

This is something that I always see.

People will build a component or a page that’s good enough.

They’ll say, “I’ll come back to it.”

Truth is, most of the time you’ll never come back to it.

And a lot of the time that website will be up for years.

The way I like to look at this is an example of my footer:

Am I fully happy with this? No.

Am I happy for this to be up for years without ever touching again? Yes.

This is something we always do as engineers.

We build it for “my local".

We’re building it on a laptop, for example. Most of your viewers will actually be on mobile phones.

You need to constantly test breakpoints. Check it out on your phone. It’s really easy, and ensure ticks contrasts.

Make your website accessible for humans and for bots.

This is easier than ever using AI to audit.

• I am going to leave a snapshot of my personal website at its current form, in the paid member GitHub repo. If you still don’t have access, send me your username and I’ll invite you.

• Send me your website URL. I’ll send some tips and tricks and do a brief audit for you.

• If you want me to expand on anything, send me a DM.