What does it mean to build your product website or landing page?

Traditionally product webpages/landing pages meant creating a polished digital brouchure. Compelling headlines, feature lists, screenshots, pricing, customer logos and a contact form were considered enough to convert visitors to customers. You needed a designer, a developer, a copywriter (and maybe many other people) and they took a few months and many iterations to get it done. The process was slow and involved a lot of communication to set expectations and finally get it to what you wanted.

With most product websites now being built by AI, things did become much faster! For the first version of Illumea's landing page, I didn't design. Just gave the colours and asked Claude to build. It looked decent and conveyed the message. Reading through it and going through many others as well, they all looked and conveyed the same... "measurable business outcomes", feature blocks with same icons or the section-brows. So while trying to build something a bit more unique, we all built the same thing. Well, many of us are not "power prompters" who can get AI to build something different.

For the latest version of the landing page, I designed and mostly coded it as well. I did vibe-code many parts of it, at the same time, I took the help of AI to test different positioning, restructure sections, scafoldded the app and trusted it to code the blog section competely. It took 2 hrs for the vibe-coding part and about a week-and-a-half for design and development. That was quick! On the copy side, AI can make anything look polished. What it struggles with is clarity. The difference between a site that converts and one that doesn't is almost always the words, not the visuals.

As I learn more about using AI, here are a few things I noticed about building with AI:

1. Vibe-coding the front end is fast but bloats quickly
2. Be prepared to audit and fix security issues. AI can help, but it is not the best at it.
3. AI copy is generic until you push it hard with specific positioning and your thoughts
4. The real win is iteration speed. I can test a new angle or a design thought quickly
5. Scaffolding & setup is faster as well

From the visitors angle, the website is becoming a conversation, not a destination. Your visitor lands on your site with a specific problem in their head. Something they need solved. Something they are maybe willing to pay for if the right product shows up. They don't want to navigate through a lot of information. It should be as easy as asking ChatGPT or Claude. We will get there sooner :)

The last point is basically where Illumea comes in, turning passive website visits into active, intelligent conversations that generate real insights.