Blog4 min read
Are AI website builders any good for a portfolio?
They are good at the part you were going to get wrong, and bad at the part you cannot delegate. Knowing which is which is most of the answer.
What do AI site builders actually do well?
They get you past the blank page, which is where most personal sites die. A conventional builder opens on an empty canvas and asks you to be a designer, a copywriter and an information architect before you have written a sentence. That is three jobs, none of them the one you were trying to do, and it is why so many personal sites exist as a half-finished draft nobody has opened in a year.
They are also genuinely good at the mechanical work: reading a structured document like a resume, pulling out the sections, writing connective prose that is unremarkable in the way connective prose should be, and producing a layout that is typographically competent. None of that is creative work, and all of it takes a human a surprisingly long time.
And restyling by description removes a real barrier. Saying what you want and getting it is a different activity from learning where a tool hides its spacing controls, and for someone who is not going to learn a design tool, it is the difference between adjusting the page and living with it.
Where do they visibly fail?
Judgement, in three specific places. Which two of your projects you actually want to be asked about. Whether the job you list third is the one you are trying to get rather than the one you are trying to leave. And which true sentence about you is the one worth leading with. A model has no way to know any of these, and it will not tell you that it is guessing.
The second failure is house style. Anything that generates a starting point produces a recognisable one, and readers who have seen a few of them start to notice. A page published exactly as drafted looks like a page published exactly as drafted, and the sameness reads as indifference even to someone who could not explain why.
The third is smaller but worth naming: generated prose defaults to a slightly inflated register. If a description of your work reads as more impressive than you would say it out loud, that is the tell, and it is worth deflating in your own words before anyone else does it for you.
How do you stop the page looking generated?
Change the order, cut something, and rewrite one paragraph in your own voice. That is five minutes of work and it does most of the job, because the parts that make a page look like a person are exactly the parts that require knowing which things matter.
Then read the whole thing out loud once. Anything you would not say to someone at a table is a sentence to rewrite, and generated copy tends to fail that test in a consistent, easy-to-spot way. This is the same edit a good writer would do to their own first draft, and the fact that a model wrote the draft does not change what the edit is.
When should you not use one?
If you write HTML and CSS comfortably, build it yourself and host it statically. You will get exactly what you want, you will own every byte of it, and the cost is a weekend you apparently do not mind spending. That is a better outcome than any generated page and it is honest to say so.
If you already have a strong visual specification, a brand you have to match, or a layout you can picture precisely, a template builder gets you there more directly than describing it will. Description is a good interface for people who know what they want it to feel like and a poor one for people who know exactly what they want it to look like.
For everyone else, and that is most people, the trade is a couple of minutes and less control over the markup, against a weekend and a page you will finish. DebutPage is in that category: it drafts from your resume, publishing is free, and you can build the whole thing before making an account, which means you can find out whether the result is any good on your own content before deciding anything.
The short version: Let it do the mechanical half and do the judgement half yourself. A generated page that nobody edited looks exactly like what it is.