AI Web dev?

[AlphamaleZed]

Yeah it’s late but the idea came to mind. 
 

thinking about AI and we’re using it a lot however I’m wondering if anyone has the idea and done it to recreate their school website using Lovable or other tools available?

 

I wonder if this may be the key cutting costs effectively and not getting ripped off by education providers? 
 

Essentially it will be a AI-Website powered for schools and easy to work with and having a CMS. Edits are easy and designs always modern. 
 

I am sure if there’s other tools web based it maybe worth using too so not just paying for a single item. 
I use epraise private data apis now locked to our IP and restricted for custom built Attendance and epraise points. 
 

what’s your thoughts? Is it time to make our own stuff? 

[TechMonkey]

I'm sure it is possible.  I don't have the experience or knowledge to know how production ready the output from these tools is.  Alot of what I am hearing is that they are great for prototyping, o delegating out prototyping to less technical staff, but don't make great code.

 

But you can run your own website now, cutting the cost.  There are a multitude of opensource CMSs that you can self-host and use templates, or code your own with very little coding ability.  Generally, the decision comes down to do you want the buck to stop internally or have someone else to take up the slack.  If you are a one man band then it might be good to have someone else deal with the website to free you up to do other things.  The question often isn't "can we do this?", it is "do we have capacity to do this" or worse, "if something goes wrong do we have the capacity to deal with it in a timely manner"

[AlphamaleZed]

34 minutes ago, TechMonkey said:

I'm sure it is possible.  I don't have the experience or knowledge to know how production ready the output from these tools is.  Alot of what I am hearing is that they are great for prototyping, o delegating out prototyping to less technical staff, but don't make great code.

 

But you can run your own website now, cutting the cost.  There are a multitude of opensource CMSs that you can self-host and use templates, or code your own with very little coding ability.  Generally, the decision comes down to do you want the buck to stop internally or have someone else to take up the slack.  If you are a one man band then it might be good to have someone else deal with the website to free you up to do other things.  The question often isn't "can we do this?", it is "do we have capacity to do this" or worse, "if something goes wrong do we have the capacity to deal with it in a timely manner"

What I have noticed recently is that a lot of people are using these tools to create websites and apps they all look the same it is really weird.

Apps and Sites developed are fluent and they do databases which is all secured through them so not too bad of a shout.

I am guessing a lot of other schools have websites where staff can adjust the site but still left with IT.

[dhicks]

48 minutes ago, TechMonkey said:

I don't have the experience or knowledge to know how production ready the output from these tools is.

 

I find AI tools (I've mostly been using Gemini) can do a pretty good job of writing code a function at a time - ask it to write a function to do a specific thing, copy and paste the code, maybe adjust to fit your exact usage, it does reduce the amount of time you spend of the more fiddly bits. It can generally create HTML page templates quite nicely as well, so an AI coupled with a static site generation tool (Hugo or similar) can turn out a website quite quickly. I've used Google Drive / OneDrive as the content store for a website - all the content consists of Word / Excel files than get converted into Markdown and then run through Hugo to create a website. Interestingly, with the current focus on AI, this means you also have all your content handily ready in Markdown format for feeding into an AI if you want as well.

[Rob_D]

57 minutes ago, TechMonkey said:

But you can run your own website now, cutting the cost.  There are a multitude of opensource CMSs that you can self-host and use templates, or code your own with very little coding ability.  Generally, the decision comes down to do you want the buck to stop internally or have someone else to take up the slack. 

 

I'd never want to self-host the school website again. It's way too much stress, and the hassle of trying to arrange even brief downtime was enough to drive me batty. That nonsense can stay in the cloud where it's someone else's problem.

[TechMonkey]

56 minutes ago, Rob_D said:

 

I'd never want to self-host the school website again. It's way too much stress, and the hassle of trying to arrange even brief downtime was enough to drive me batty. That nonsense can stay in the cloud where it's someone else's problem.

Don't disagree, but self-host could be cloud based.  Just not using a company to do it all for you.  Still not sure I would want to manage the website again, let alone technically manage it.

[drutt]

We're bringing our website back in-house after 10+ years of having it with an external provider, mostly because they wanted £150 per hour of dev time on little changes. It was really limiting our ability to adapt at times.

 

I've taken it on myself on the condition it includes a pay rise and am making use of WordPress as the CMS and a pagebuilder provided by our shared web host. It should be more than sufficient for our needs and gives us the flexibility to do what we want, when we want as well.

Edited April 28 by drutt
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