If you’re looking for a beautiful, functional, hand-coded website, you’ve reached the right place. We Are Seven works with authors, artists, artisans, and other creators to develop an online presence. You can rely on our designer-developer to translate your artistic vision into the perfect web design for your small business or portfolio.
Many creators who value human ingenuity and creativity feel uncertain about relying on AI-powered web builders. This can be for ethical reasons as well as artistic ones. Fortunately, We Are Seven offers human-designed websites built on efficient, AI-free coding. Below is a sample of the work we've done for artists and writers, as well as our portfolio sites.
Red and green and blue and pink and yellow, black and white.
The downsides of AI website generators are well-known: virtually identical layouts, poorly optimized pages, slow loading times, etc. But the biggest (and arguably underlying) issue we see is that the coding they produce is very low quality.
Because AI website generators don't view the project as a cohesive whole (at least, not currently), the code is bloated and at times contradictory. This often means buggier pages and less responsive designs. I want to be clear that these "template-based" or AI-generated websites are not necessarily bad (read my blog about when authors should choose a free web builder to learn more about that). But concise, human-coded websites offer advantages that a boiler plate layout never could.
With a human-coded site, you'll get...
As a brief disclaimer, not every website should have a one-of-a-kind design. A navigable site is one where the components are easily recognizable. That's why most sites start with navigation and a logo at the top, move onto a body area (with or without sidebars), and end with a footer. You want your viewer to be immediately oriented to your site's layout.
Having said that, you don't want your site to look indistinguishable from hundreds (if not thousands) of others. And that's the unfortunate result of working with a template-based website generator. There are only so many ways you can tweak a cookie-cutter design.
Your site is your brand. You want it to stand out in customers' minds long after they've navigated away. A skilled designer-developer can incorporate your company's vibes in the structure of your page.
Buying a website template or WordPress theme, even one coded by hand, typically means getting a lot of extras that you don't need and won't use. That may sound great on the surface--who doesn't like getting bonus features for free? But the reality is all that baggage can (and frequently does) make website management more difficult. Not only is it harder to debug a site with hundreds of lines of superfluous code, it's also more likely to create problems when you try to make even simple changes.
The solution is efficient code that doesn't rely on unnecessary plugins or pointlessly complicated scripts. At We Are Seven, we code each site from the ground up, including only what's necessary. This means you'll get a streamlined design that anyone can modify (should you choose to host with someone else or work with a different developer in the future).
For all that website generators are referred to as artificial intelligence, they aren't actually artificially intelligent (yet). They can't think or problem solve the way a human coder can. And, as mentioned earlier, they can't understand your website on a whole-project basis. Maybe one day they'll be able to, but at the moment, it still takes a human to design a website with both the creator and user in mind.
We Are Seven is a web design and development company serving independent small businesses. We specialize in building and maintaining websites for authors, artists, artisans, and creators of all kinds. You can learn more about our abilities and experience by visiting our About Us page.