Improve Design
Keep every page, every word, your logo and your photos, and let Max replace the design — at a Light, Medium or High effort level — on a website you rebuilt from an old one or on any website you already have.
A website can be right in every fact and still look ten years old. Improve Design keeps what is yours — every page at its address, every word of copy, your logo, your brand's colors, your photographs, your forms and your links — and replaces everything that is only design: the layout, the type, the spacing, the color system, the way your pictures are shown, the menu, the motion. The result should look as if a designer rebuilt your site, and anyone who knows your business should recognize it in one glance.
You meet it in two places:
- When you start from a website. The last step of starting from an existing website asks how to create the site: Identical Clone (the default — as close to the original as possible) or Improve Design. Choosing Improve Design builds the redesigned site straight from what we captured; no identical copy is built first, so it costs no extra time.
- On any website, from the builder menu: Tools → Improve Design. It works on a website you rebuilt from an old one and on one you built here from scratch. The original is your website as it stands when you start, and the versions before it stay in Version history, so going back is one click.
Effort level
Choosing Improve Design shows a three-stop Effort level: Light, Medium or High. Medium is preselected.
| Level | What changes |
|---|---|
| Light | The same layout and the same sections, modernized: a fresh type pairing with readable sizes, consistent spacing, a cleaner palette built around your brand's colors, polished forms, and the dated details fixed — beveled buttons, text baked into pictures, a narrow fixed column, hard-to-read text over photos. |
| Medium | A fresh design: every section is recomposed from a design brief; sections may be merged, split or reordered within a page; a slideshow becomes one strong hero plus a row of cards; the menu is regrouped to a handful of top-level items with the rest beneath. |
| High | A total redesign: bold art direction, a signature moment on the home page, sections and navigation rebuilt throughout. Every page, every word and your logo are still exactly yours. |
Additional information
Under the effort level there is a box for your own instructions — anything the redesign must keep or do that the level alone would not decide. "Keep the full-screen video in the hero with the text over it, not a small video beside the headline." "The menu stays on the left." "Use the blue from our logo for every button." Whatever you write there is followed throughout the redesign — it goes into the first message and every message after it, and when Claude builds the site it goes into the brief every builder works from and into what the finished website is checked against — and it wins over the effort level's own defaults. The one thing it cannot do is drop a page, an address or a word of your copy: those stay yours whatever the instructions say. An instruction that could not be followed is named in the report rather than quietly replaced. Up to 2,000 characters; leave it empty to let the effort level decide everything. When you start from a website, the same box sits under Identical Clone too — there it takes changes you want made to an otherwise faithful copy (see Starting from an existing website), and what you type stays when you switch between the cards.
Whatever the level, the same things never change: your pages and their addresses, your words (a paragraph stays a paragraph, a list stays a list), your business facts, your logo exactly as drawn, your brand's core colors, your real photographs, and every link out. Max may add the small words a new layout needs — a label above a heading, a "View all" link, a button's wording, alt text — and never a new claim, statistic or testimonial.
What happens
Max works the way a designer would, and you can watch each step in the chat:
- An audit of your current site: what carries your brand (keep), what dates it (the to-do list), and what is hard to use.
- An image ledger: every picture, how large it really is, and how large the new design needs it — so the design is written for the photographs you have rather than asking a small photo to fill a whole screen.
- A design brief: palette, type, layout, how images are treated, the one moment that defines the site, and the navigation.
- The build, page by page, every word carried across. Forms become native forms styled in the new design, so submissions keep arriving in your Forms inbox.
- Two checks. After every update, every page is compared with the original's words: a page that lost a heading, a paragraph or a list item is fixed in the next update. Then a design review looks at the result — is every dated detail answered, is the business still recognizable, do forms look right, does any picture show larger than it should — and fixes what it finds. A difference that is the redesign is never "fixed" back.
A large website takes several updates; Max keeps going on its own, and the banner over the canvas says what it is doing. Keep the builder open until it finishes.
Images
A new design shows pictures larger and on sharper screens than an old one did, so a soft photograph or a pixelated logo the old site got away with becomes the first thing anyone sees. Max handles this in a fixed order: it looks for a larger original of each picture first (a thumbnail is often a copy of a full-size file the old site also published), then designs around what is still small — an inset instead of a full-screen banner, a tight grid, a color wash that makes uneven photos read as one set.
On some platforms an image service is also available, and then Max can sharpen a soft photo (a restoration upscale, never a repaint — faces, lettering and logos stay what they are), clean up a logo, cut out a background for a new layout, and generate a background or a texture where the design needs one your site does not have. It never replaces or alters a photograph of your people, your place, your products or your events, and never touches another organization's logo. Without that service no generated imagery appears at all. Every result lands in your media library as a file of its own, so the original is always still there.
Afterwards
- Read the summary. It ties each design decision to the thing it fixes, lists the three to five pictures a new photograph would most improve, and names any words it could not carry across and why.
- Proofread as you always would. Your words are unchanged, so anything out of date on the old site is out of date here too — now in a design worth fixing it in.
- Go back if you like. Every update is a version in Version history; restore any of them, including the one from before Improve Design started.
- Push further, or pull back. "Make the hero calmer", "use the blue more", "put the services back in two columns" — the conversation is for that.