Website Templates in the era of AI

It’s been a hot minute since my last email! Welcome to the hundreds of new subscribers. I appreciate you all. 🫶

In today’s instalment, I discuss the future of AI & web design, give you the gift of two early Black Friday deals and go through all the changes to Carrd since we last spoke.

And if you’re curious enough, you’ll find some other treats.

AI has been the hot topic of conversation for most of 2023. We've seen ChatGPT revolutionise several industries. But what is the future of Website Design?

I spend much of my week building websites for clients and my side projects. With countless AI businesses popping up daily, it can be daunting to think - will my industry be affected by AI soon?

This post got me thinking that Carrd is one of the few services I use that hasn’t adopted any AI - yet! Then I asked myself the question: What would AI built into Carrd look like? What functionality and purpose would it serve?

To answer that, we need to look at other website builders and what AI integrations they have implemented.

Apps and services in general that involve any writing seem to all have built text generation integration. Generate text from prompts or rewrite existing text - IMO, this is a complete waste of time.

Most companies now charge a premium for AI services or offer a limited number of prompts before charging extra. This AI text writing is so widely available now that if you paid for AI on all your services, you’d be paying hundreds of dollars extra a month. If I want AI to help me draft text, I will use ChatGPT or similar - one service I can access on my laptop, no wrappers.

So, what else can AI do for website design? Sites like relume.io promise to generate a whole website for you in seconds from just a short prompt. Whilst this is an amazing advancement in theory - in practice, the results can be average at best.

As the AI saying goes - this is the worst that AI will ever be, meaning that we are in the age of rapid AI improvements. It won’t be too long until website builders become genuinely useful tools. Is Carrd working on integrated AI features? Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer to that.

Carrd is such a simple and intuitive tool to use that, at this point in time, AI would make the service more complicated to use instead of simplifying it. What a lot of AI integrations fail to do is to make the user’s life easier.

I am interested to hear your thoughts on AI and how you think Carrd to make it useful.

Black Friday Deals

Two delightful Black Friday Deals await you!

Jason’s Plugins

Black Friday sale for Jason's Plugins For Carrd is here. Use BF2023 for 40% off all plugins. Code valid until 30 Nov 2023.

Carrd Black Friday Deal

The 2023 Black Friday code for 40% off any renewal, upgrade or new Carrd Pro Plan dropped yesterday! You can even buy Carrd as a gift.

Use code BF2023 - Click here to renew or upgrade your Carrd account.

Ends December 8th 2023.

Zite Design - Professional Carrd Templates

Zite Design offer one of the largest libraries of Professional Carrd Templates. By my count there are now 69 templates on the site.

Notable Carrd Updates

Since I haven’t done an update on Carrd Updates in a long time, I’m going to bullet-point the important changes. For a full list of changes, visit the Carrd Changelog.

Corner Rounding

• Corner Rounding can now be toggled for each corner.

Copy/Paste & Keyboard Shortcuts

• Copy Elements Between Sites - Added keyboard shortcuts to copy & paste elements between browser tabs:

  • Cross Copy (Ctrl + Shift + C or Cmd + Shift + C)

  • Cross Paste (Ctrl + Shift + V or Cmd + Shift + V) 

• Added keyboard shortcuts to:

  • Copy (Ctrl + C or Cmd + C)

  • Cut (Ctrl + X or Cmd + X)

  • Paste (Ctrl + V or Cmd + V)

  • Delete (Delete)

  • Clone (Ctrl + D or Cmd + D)

  • Undo (Ctrl + Z or Cmd + Z)

  • Redo (Ctrl + Shift + Z or Cmd + Shift + Z)

  • Quick Publish (Ctrl + S or Cmd + S)

  • Publish (Ctrl + Shift + S or Cmd + Shift + S)

  • View Site (Alt + V or Option + V)

  • Preview Animations (Alt + P or Option + P)

  • Switch to Desktop View (Alt + 1 or Option + 1)

  • Switch to Mobile View (Alt + 2 or Option + 2)

  • Switch to Expanded Mobile View (Alt + 3 or Option + 3)

  • Show Sections Panel (Alt + S or Option + S)

  • Move Interface to Left (Alt + Left or Option + Left)

  • Move Interface to Right (Alt + Right or Option + Right)

• Added Keyboard Shortcuts article

• Copy to Clipboard - Added clipboard URL support (eg. clipboard:SALE25).

Blur

• Image Element - Added Blur and Unblur hover animation effects.

• Gallery Element - Added Unblur hover animation effect.

Text

• Spoiler Text - Added support for ||spoiler text||

• Staggered Text - Added support for Stagger when using an On Visible animation effect.

Dividers

• Added Gradient option when using "Single" style.

Variables, Flags & UTMs

These can be a little confusing if you’ve not dealt with them before. If you would be interested in a video tutorial, please let me know.

• UTM Parameters - There is now helpful documentation on how these work with various services via Carrd Forms and how to use them via variables.

• Flags - Added the ability to append flags to certain URL types (eg. ||nofollow).

• Variables can now be used in links to sections.

• URL Types - This documentation is new and very useful.

Protect Image From Crawlers

• Added Protect images from crawlers option (requires Pro Lite or higher).

Tables

• Increased column limit to 20.

Customising Site Files

More advanced use cases may require you to customise one or more of a site's supporting files (such as its robots.txt or ads.txt files), in which case the Site Files feature will allow you to do just that. Instructions (requires Pro Plus).

Linked Devices

• Added Linked Devices Page - You can now manage and remove devices that you have previously signed into Carrd on. (Account → Security → Linked Devices)

QR Codes

• Scannable QR Codes can now be generated and downloaded for any published site or template demo (requires Pro Lite or higher)

One New Template

I must confess that I've been prioritising my Template Library site and Notion Database over creating new Carrd Templates.

CV 2.0 Template

This is my one and only new template for the last six months.

I have made two versions, though - one for users on the Pro Lite and one for those still on the Free Tier. Black Friday is a great time to go Pro!

New templates are in the works and will be ready in time for the next newsletter.

I Need Your Help, Please!

If you’ve made it this far down, you clearly love Carrd as much as I do! Thank you for taking the time to read this email. 🙏

I’ve been updating my Notion Database of Templates and Makers this week and need a few people to give me feedback on a new and improved version.

Please reply to this email if you have 10 minutes or so to provide me with feedback. All you’ll need to do is click around the new database and let me know your thoughts.

Until next time - happy Carrding. ✌️