How You Pictured It
Join host Kate Hejde of Dear Kate Brand Strategy as she chats all things business and marketing for creative entrepreneurs. Kate is a big believer that you can build a business that fits your life, just How You Pictured It. There is no one right way to run a business. You can absolutely base your decisions on your priorities and values so that your business is aligned and joy-filled. With 11+ years in creative small business, Kate shares practical tips, inspirational stories, and the ups and downs of being a business owner and parent. Listen in for short weekly episodes on a variety of topics including pricing, marketing, social media, and mindset. Find more from Kate at dearkatebrandstrategy.com
How You Pictured It
7 Ways AI Can Help You DIY Your Website
Ever feel like building a website is an impossible task? You’re not alone! But what if you had a virtual assistant helping you every step of the way? That’s exactly what AI can do! In today’s episode, I’m breaking down 7 powerful ways AI can make your DIY website journey faster, easier, and stress-free.
We’re covering:
✅ How AI can help with SEO & competitor research so you stand out
✅ Using AI to write website copy that connects & converts
✅ AI-powered brand colors, fonts, and mood boards
✅ Generating custom stock photos to match your brand
✅ AI-assisted layout & design inspiration to make your site shine
✅ Adding custom code (without knowing how to code!)
✅ Using AI for market research & ideal client insights
If you’re a small business owner, creative entrepreneur, or service provider DIY-ing your website, this episode is packed with actionable tips to help you work smarter, not harder!
🔗 Mentioned Resources & Links:
Website Writer AI – AI-Powered Copywriting for Showit
Free Website Checklist – Make Sure You Have the Essentials
💬 Which AI trick are you most excited to try? Let’s chat!
DM me on Instagram [@dearkatebrandstrategy] or leave a review & let me know!
🎧 Love this episode? Don’t forget to subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
Follow Dear Kate Brand Strategy on Instagram
Learn more at Howyoupicturedit.com
Ever wish you had a personal assistant to help you design, write, and optimize your website for your small business? Well, good news, you do. AI can be your secret weapon to building a show it website that looks pro level without the headache. Today I'm sharing seven ways AI can make your DIY website journey easier, faster, and way less overwhelming. We're going to go in order here so that we're starting at the beginning of building your website and working through to the very end. First up is going to be using AI for research. We're going to do some competitor research, figure out our market and find our keywords. The tools we're going to be using here are primarily perplexity And ChatGPT's deep research mode. And these tools you're going to use prompts like, analyze my competitor, Help me find keyword gaps, What keywords have a lot of traffic but have low competition. You can even put in a competitor's website and have them help you figure out what terms that website is ranking for and how you can compete better. Moving on to number two. We're still doing research, but this time we're doing more market research in general and getting into the head of our ideal client. One of my favorite tricks is to ask AI to act as my ideal customer. I give it as many demographics and psychographics that I know, and then I start asking questions and ask it to act as if it were my client using their language. I have a full video on using AI for market research here with other tips. Check that one out if that's something you're interested in. But getting into your client's head and being able to talk to their pain points, figuring out that messaging and how you can stand out from your competitors and show people that you're the right choice for them is huge. So using AI to help with that market research step will be a big cost savings and a big time saving, especially if you're a newer business and you don't have those ideal clients to reach out to already and interview for real. This is a great way to jump into the mind of your customer and use what's available online to really get into how they think, how they talk and how you can help them. Our third way to use AI is with our copywriting. Website copy can be tough and I think that it can get very overwhelming, but there's really a formula and a framework that you can follow to make sure that every page of your website answers the questions that people have, Make sure that they're understanding who you are, what you do, and how you help them, and that you're the right fit for them. I've made it easy with a special tool that I created called Website Writer AI. It takes my copywriting frameworks, rules, and principles, and then also asks you questions about your business to get to know you, what you do, who you are, and pulls that automatically into that framework and writes the copy for you. It's a great first draft, and then you can work from there to Tweak and work with AI to write better copy that sounds just like you and connects and converts your clients. Please don't pop into ChatGPT and say, write me an about page. You're not going to get a great result. You want to make sure that you're following those principles and guidelines that help you get copy that actually converts. Um, chat GPT with a generic prompt like that is going to give you a generic answer. The fourth way we're going to use AI is for our brand visuals. We've got that messaging, we've got that core idea of who we are, what we do, who we serve, but we need to back it up with the visuals. So many times I see small business owners pick their favorite colors for their branding or their favorite fonts and they're not necessarily the right match to what we're actually saying on the page. we want the visuals to match the words and give that one two punch that gets somebody on board, builds your credibility, and gets them excited to work with you. You don't want bright, bold colors, hot pink, and yellow, and then words like peaceful, calming. Those don't go together. So with AI, there's a few things that we can do here. We can upload our copy and say, help me figure out what aesthetic would match this messaging. Help me find brand colors, fonts, suggest visuals that go with this. You can ask AI to build you a mood board. I love doing that and seeing what comes out because it really does show you how much words have visual reference as well. It doesn't feel like it necessarily when you start thinking about what your brand colors might be, but when you get really clear on that messaging piece, it's so much easier to find the colors that are just the right fit. If you've already started gathering inspiration in a Pinterest mood board or elsewhere, you can also screenshot those and pull them into ChatGPT and say, help me find a cohesive color palette with enough contrast, a dark, a light, and some pops of color that match my messaging from this general vibe or idea. And that is a way you can tie in what you visually see and feel is like the right fit to what your messaging is. And it helps fine tune that. The fifth way we're using AI is to create custom stock photos. Have you ever needed a photo and you go search Pexels or one of the other stock photo sites and see the same photo that everybody else has used on their website of that laptop with the coffee cup. And you need something different. Your brand is different. You want to stand out, but you don't have the funds necessarily or the time to get custom photos. You need one shot, whatever it may be. This is where you can pull into mid journey and start creating your own images. these are so fun to do I created custom stock photos for all of the images that I used in my website templates. And I've created custom stock photos for my own brand as well. Again, it's a way to build credibility and trust in your brand. and that brand cohesion from start to finish. Next up, I love this tip. It is something that I've just recently started doing. I sometimes will have my copy written and I'm just stuck on how to make it fit on the page. I want it to be laid out a certain way, but I really just can't like fine tune it in my brain. I can't visualize it. And so what I'll do is go into Claude AI and say, here is maybe the template that I have. I'll do a screenshot, um, and here is the copy that I'm trying to put into it. I need some ideas of how to make this layout work. Cloud AI will then give me a mock up of the website with the fonts, the colors, everything already in place, and show me how to put my copy into that template in a beautiful design. Make sure to ask for conversion friendly, user friendly design and make tweaks. It's fun to say, okay, I like this, but I don't like that. Or what if we did this or that and show me what the mobile looks like. this helps DIYers stretch their thinking and their templates further, and I just love the results. which brings us to our final idea, which is to use AI as a code writer. You know I love ShowIt because it is no code drag and drop, but there are some times when you want to do something a little fancy having the power of writing code at your fingertips without having a single clue what that is or how it works is amazing. I've been using AI to write me code for making fonts different within a text box, making an embedded form from something like MailChimp match my website design better, adding a little bit of animation or hover effects, just different things that you can By asking Claude AI to write the code for you. I do find that Claude is the best for writing code. I also find it the best option for, the website layout idea that we talked about in the previous tip. Again, no need to Google for hours and try to find code that's already written. you just describe what you need and ask AI to write the code for you. This helps your site look very custom and engaging as well. Let's do a quick recap. Number one was to do deep research. Number two was to do your market research. Number three was to help with your copywriting. Four was using AI for branding colors mood board. Five was creating custom stock photos. Six was to give you design layout ideas. And seven was using it to write custom code for your website. AI isn't here to replace creativity. It's here to amplify it. It's here to help you stretch beyond what you could do on your own. If you're DIYing your website, you know that it's a big project. It's a lot to take on. And having these AI tools in your back pocket to help make things go faster, easier, better, can save you tons of time and frustration. so tell me in the comments below, which AI trick are you most excited to try out? Or if you have a question, drop it there too. If you want to see more D. I. Y. website tips, hit the subscribe button. And check out my shop at dearkatebrandstrategy. com slash shop. For templates, tools, and education. See you in the next video!