Experience design in the age of AI: a guide to your first website

Today you can have a website live in a single afternoon. With a couple of prompts, an AI tool will build the structure, write the copy and pick a color palette. That is a real advantage if you are starting a business with no budget. The problem is that every one of your competitors has the same advantage.

Whether users quickly understand what you offer, whether they trust you, and whether the next step is easy to take. That is experience design, and that is what this guide is about.

I wrote it for people who are just starting a business and wondering where to begin with their website. These are practical tips, based on what I have seen in more than eight years working in product design, growth and conversion optimization.

What changed with AI

Three changes directly affect any new business building its online presence.

The first is volume. There are far more sites competing for the same attention, and most of them look alike because they come from the same templates and the same models.

The second is how people search. Some of your future customers will find you through answers from ChatGPT, Gemini or the AI summaries Google now shows. Those tools read your site and decide whether it is worth citing. A confusing site with no concrete information is less likely to show up.

The third is user patience. Whoever lands on your site has ten other options one click away. If in the first few seconds they do not understand what you sell, who it is for and why they should choose you, they leave.

That is why the design of your website has a direct effect on how many people find you, how many stay and how many end up buying or contacting you.

1. Define who you are talking to and what you want them to do

Before thinking about colors or fonts, answer two questions in writing: who is the person who will visit your site, and what specific action do you want them to take.

That action should be a single one, at least at the start. It can be buying, booking a call, requesting a quote or messaging you on WhatsApp. When a website tries to get the user to do five different things, it usually gets none of them.

An example: if you sell custom cakes in your neighborhood, your customer is probably searching from their phone, wants to see photos, rough prices and whether you deliver. The main action is messaging you to place an order. The whole site should support that step.

This exercise is the foundation of product design applied to your business. It forces you to make decisions with the user at the center, and it saves you a lot of work later.

2. Design the funnel before the page

A funnel is the path a person takes from discovering you to buying from you. Funnel design means thinking through that entire path and deciding what the user needs to see or feel at each stage.

For a small business, a simple funnel usually has these stages:

1. Discovery. The person finds you on Google, on Instagram, through a recommendation or in an AI answer.
2. Interest. They visit your site and understand within seconds what you offer and who it is for.
3. Trust. They see proof: real photos, testimonials, case studies, clear prices, contact details.
4. Action. They find a visible button that takes them straight to buying, booking or contacting you.
5. Follow-up. After the first purchase or inquiry, you have a way to reach them again.

Once you have this map, much of the website is already defined. Each section of the site answers to a stage. If a section does not help any of them, you probably do not need it.

It also helps you spot where people drop off. If lots of people visit and nobody writes, the problem is between interest and action. If they write but do not buy, it is in trust or pricing.

3. Structure your website for people, search engines and AI

The good news is that what helps people also helps Google and AI assistants. A site that is clear to a human is easier for a machine to understand.

Some concrete practices:

• A main headline that says what you do. “Custom cakes with delivery in Santiago” works better than “We sweeten your moments”. The first one matches a real search.
• One page per important service or product. If you offer three services, each deserves its own page with its own title and description. That way each one can rank for different searches.
• Concrete, verifiable information. Prices or ranges, delivery areas, hours, lead times, FAQs. AI models cite sources that answer questions directly.
• Copy written by you. You can use AI for the first draft, but make sure it sounds like your business and includes details only you know. Generic copy gets lost among thousands of identical sites.
• The technical basics done right. Titles and descriptions for every page, images with alt text, a site that loads fast and a sitemap submitted to Google Search Console.

4. Start small

A common mistake at the start is wanting a site with many sections, a blog, a store, animations and an English version from day one. That takes time and money, and it almost always delays the only thing that matters early on: validating that people want what you sell.

To begin, a clear home page, one page per main service or product and an easy way to contact you are usually enough. Three well-built pages beat ten half-finished ones.

Within that smaller scope, take care of these points:

• Mobile-first design. For most small businesses, more than half of visits come from phones. Check your site on one before you publish.
• Speed. Compressed images, few fonts and no effects that do not add anything. Every extra second of load time costs you visitors.
• Visual hierarchy. The most important things first and largest. The main call-to-action button should be visible without searching for it.
• Consistency. The same colors, fonts and button styles across the whole site. Consistent design signals that there is someone serious behind it.

5. Measure from day one and optimize conversion

Conversion optimization is the work of increasing the share of visitors who end up taking the action you defined. To do it you need data, and ideally you start collecting it the day you publish the site.

You do not need expensive tools. You can start with these:

• Google Analytics 4 to see how many people arrive, where they come from and which pages they view.
• Events on your key buttons, such as WhatsApp, the contact form or checkout. That way you know how many people click, in addition to how many visit.
• Google Search Console to see which searches you appear for on Google and how many clicks you get.
• Microsoft Clarity, which is free and shows session recordings and heatmaps. Watching real people use your site teaches you a lot.

With data in hand, make small changes one at a time: the main button text, the order of sections, a different photo, a more visible price. Give it a reasonable amount of time and compare. If you change ten things at once, you will not know which one worked.

A simple rule I use: if a page gets lots of visits and few conversions, that is your biggest opportunity. It is easier to improve what already gets traffic than to get new traffic.

6. Use AI as support and make the decisions yourself

AI tools are very useful when you are starting out. They help you draft copy, brainstorm names, check spelling, summarize what your customers say or build a first version of your site so you have something to show.

Where you should be careful is with the core decisions. An AI does not know your customers, why they choose you or what doubts they have before buying. If you let it define your value proposition, your structure and your copy, you will end up with a site that looks fine and is very similar to everyone else’s.

A workflow that works well: you define the audience, the action and the funnel. AI helps you produce faster. Then you review everything with a critical eye and adjust it with what you know about your business.

7. Consider hiring a professional

Doing everything yourself is possible, and many businesses start that way. But there comes a point where the time you spend fighting a template or guessing why nobody contacts you is worth more than what an experienced person’s help would cost.

A product design and user experience professional can help you:

• Sharpen your value proposition and turn it into a clear website.
• Build the complete funnel design, from how people find you to how you close the sale.
• Set up the technical foundation properly: SEO, speed, analytics and conversion events.
• Read the data and prioritize which changes to make first to improve conversion.
• Avoid mistakes that are expensive to fix later, like a page structure that does not rank or a site you cannot measure.

You do not need a huge project. Often a short consultation, a review of your current site or the design of a single well-made landing page already makes a difference in your results.

If you are interested, let’s talk. I am Dante Curin, a product and growth designer with more than eight years of experience at companies like Uber, Cornershop and Toteat. I work on experience design, funnel design, SEO and conversion optimization, and I enjoy helping businesses that are taking their first steps. Write to me and let’s talk about your project.

Checklist for your first website

AI made it easier to have an online presence. What is still hard, and what weighs most on your results, is making that presence understandable, trustworthy and able to lead to a sale. Before you publish, go through this list:

• I know who my customer is and the main action I want them to take.
• I have mapped my funnel, from discovery to follow-up.
• My home page headline says what I do, for whom and where.
• Each important service or product has its own page.
• The site looks good and loads fast on mobile.
• The main call-to-action button is visible without scrolling.
• Google Analytics, Search Console and conversion events are set up.
• I reviewed and edited by hand everything I generated with AI.

If several points are missing or you are not sure where to start, write to me and we can work through it together.