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Creating your first website

Naming a website, writing a brief the assistant can build from, and what happens to your first draft.

A website in Max AI Builder starts with two things: a name and a brief. The name is a label you can change at any time. The brief is the description you give the assistant to work from — and it's where nearly all of the quality of your first draft comes from.

Naming it

From your dashboard, choose Website under "What would you like to build?" (or Start something new once you have one), type a name, and select Create website. If you already have a domain in mind, open Already have a domain in mind? first and choose an option; otherwise the builder opens straight away.

Use your real business name. Beyond labelling the website in your dashboard, the name is what your free web address is made from: a bakery called Rosewood Bakehouse gets something like rosewood-bakehouse.maxaibuilder.com. Your free address is shown on the website's Domain page; if the exact address is taken you get a close variation.

The name is also the assistant's very first clue about what it's building, before you've written a word of brief.

Writing the brief

The builder opens and asks how you'd like to begin. There are four doors, and you can change everything later — this only points the assistant in a first direction.

  • Start from a website — point at a site you already have or admire, and it gets rebuilt as your own. See Starting from an existing website.
  • Describe it — tell the assistant about your business. This is the one most people want.
  • Start from an image — upload a design, a screenshot, or a photo of a sketch, and it is built as real pages, not shown as a picture. See Building from a design.
  • Blank canvas — skip the assistant for now and open the editor yourself.

Choose Describe it and write a few sentences. The single most useful habit here is to describe your business, not a web page. You know your trade; the assistant knows web design. Let each side do its half.

A brief that works:

I run a family Italian restaurant in Portland called Vitello's. We do lunch and dinner, Tuesday to Sunday, and we're known for our wood-fired pizza. I need a homepage, a menu page, and a page with our hours and address.

For ideas specific to your work, browse the industry guides. Each group has its own page, such as beauty, wellness and fitness, with links to more specific guides and a starting prompt you can adapt for your business.

Things worth putting in, if you know them:

  • What you do and who for — "a two-person plumbing company doing emergency callouts across north Leeds."
  • The pages you expect — home, services, about, contact, a gallery.
  • The facts you want on the page — opening hours, phone number, service area, qualifications, the three things customers always ask.
  • The feeling — "warm and family-run, not corporate." A couple of words does more here than a paragraph.

Things not worth putting in: layout instructions, color hex codes, font names, or anything about sections and grids. Ask for those afterwards, once you can see what you're changing. Steering a real page is far easier than specifying one in advance.

Don't worry about getting the brief perfect. It is the first message in a conversation, not a form you have to fill in correctly.

What happens next

The assistant reads your brief, writes the pages, and the preview beside the conversation fills in as it goes. A first draft usually takes a minute or two. Then:

  • Keep talking. "Add a Desserts section to the menu." "Make the hero photo taller." Small, specific requests work better than long lists. See Chatting with the assistant.
  • Look at your free address. It always shows your latest draft, so you can open it on your phone or send it to someone whose opinion you trust. Search engines are told to ignore it, but anyone with the link can see it.
  • Publish when you're ready. Your draft doesn't go out to the world until you connect your own domain and press Publish. Until then you can experiment as freely as you like.

Everything you and the assistant change is saved as a revision, so an edit you regret can be looked back at and undone. Nothing you do here is one-way.

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