More and more developers and non-coders are creating their own websites by using AI instead of traditional drag-and-drop builders.
But AI is still new and people have a wide range of what they think is a good prompt for AI to understand.
The short answer is that it depends on what AI you are using and what you are trying to build. But I know that doesn’t fully answer your question so in this post we’ll discuss the different types of prompts you should use and what you might want to avoid.
Rule 1) Use context to get better results
One of the first mistakes we see with people new to AI prompting is that they don’t state the context of what they are trying to do. For instance, are you building a website theme for a dog groomer? Or are you a non-profit?
Do you have examples of websites that you like, someone in the industry, or a competitor?
Giving the AI context around your business makes a big difference in the result you’ll get. Instead of simply stating “what” it should build, give it the “why” it should build it.
Rule 2) State your goals
To build upon rule #1, while giving AI context, be sure to state what your goals. For example, do you want to get more business or more awareness? Do you prefer phone calls or a form submission?
Giving AI context of what your goals are will help it do what it does best and determine the best method to get there.
Rule 3) Be specific but not restrictive
On the other end of the spectrum we see people that give AI way too much restriction so it almost stifles the creativity. For example, “create a button exactly 32px from the right margin, with a 2px border, and 10px padding on the top and bottom, etc.”
This might seem harmless but what you’ve just restricted AI from doing is using the page styles to implement a button that is like the other buttons on the page and perhaps prevented the site from being responsive to different screen sizes if the button is “always 32px from the right”.
Instead have AI reference the rest of the styles on the page to create a new element with a more broad prompt like, “create a button that uses the same styles as the other buttons on the page and place it in the header.”
Rule 4) Bigger doesn’t mean better
Another thing we see related to restrictiveness is people who put 5,000+ words in a prompt. This often creates much of the restrictiveness mentioned in rule #3 with very specific requests that are often redundant and other requests that might even contradict initial requests in the same prompt.
AI will accept it but in my experience, it is often too much for it to get everything correct. Also, often times this is the person that is cramming as much information into a prompt as possible because they think it will use less AI credits if they use a single prompt. Don’t do this. It actually unnecessarily increases what is called your “context window” for the AI prompts and just costs you more credits.
This is because credits used are based on size of prompts and complexity, not prompt quantity for most AI tools. Also many AI tools have a truncate point where anything beyond a certain number of characters it too much and it either errors out or silently ignores the remainder.
So keep your prompts brief and specific but not restrictive and long to get the best results.
Rule 5) Don’t bounce between AIs
One additional rule to build upon the previous is that we often see people going to one AI chat in order to get a prompt for another AI builder like PressMeGPT. This is mostly a waste of time and here’s why:
Whenever you do this, the AI chat doesn’t really know the interworking of the builder you’ll be using, although it will pretend that it does. As a result, you get many of the mistakes mentioned above including restrictive language and extremely long, unnecessary prompts.
Examples of Good Prompts
Here are some examples of good prompts when using PressMeGPT to design a website:
“Create a website for a dog groomer that gets business primarily through phone calls. Here is a website that I like: www.some-dog-groomer.com but my colors are brown and blue, not pink like the example site. We also do dog boarding and will accept cats as well so include sections on this.”
“Update the button colors from red to blue”
“Make the text in the body centered, not left aligned.”
Examples of Bad Prompts
“create a button exactly 32px from the right margin, with a 2px border, and 10px padding on the top and bottom. Then on the next line add a 20px hidden row. Then below that create a hero section exactly 1200px wide and 600px high with a background photo of a kid playing soccer.”
“It doesn’t look right. Fix it.”
“Its broken”
Build a WordPress site with AI prompts
Whether you are an experienced website developer or non-technical, if you want to build a WordPress site and save days, try PressMeGPT for free, the best AI builder for WordPress.