How to write a chat prompt for an AI website builder

Most people typing into an AI website builder for the first time write three lines and expect magic. They get a generic three-section landing page with placeholder text and wonder if the tool is broken. It isn't. The prompt is.

The truth nobody tells you is that the chat is your brief. The same way you'd brief a freelance designer, you brief the AI. If you give a designer "build me a restaurant website," you'll get something that looks like a restaurant website but is nothing like your restaurant. AI builders work the same way.

What a good prompt actually looks like

Compare these two prompts side by side.

Vague: "Build me a restaurant website."

Specific: "Build me a website for my restaurant Coffee & Co. in Bangalore. I serve breakfast, lunch, and coffee. I want a photo menu split into sections, a reservation form that pings my WhatsApp at +91 98765 43210, and a Google Maps pin to MG Road. Use earthy browns and forest green."

The second one took 30 seconds longer to type and gave the AI enough context to build something usable on the first pass. The first one wastes five rounds of revision asking "actually, what's your restaurant called?"

The five things every prompt should include

1. Who you are. Name of the business, what you do, where you're located. Not your life story — one sentence.
2. What the site needs to do. A reservation form? A photo gallery? A WhatsApp button? Name the features.
3. Who's visiting. Are they hungry customers, prospective clients, or potential investors? The tone shifts.
4. What action you want from them. Book a table. Send a WhatsApp. Buy a print. The whole site is built around this.
5. Aesthetic direction. Colours, mood, references. "Calm, lots of whitespace, sage green" is more useful than "modern."

Be specific about the boring details

The AI is good at decisions you don't care about (font pairing, button radius, padding) and only as good as your input on decisions you do (phone number for the WhatsApp button, the actual menu items, the exact city). Spend your prompt budget on the second category.

If you wouldn't accept a freelancer guessing your phone number, don't accept the AI guessing it either.

Prompt by section, not by site

Trying to describe an entire site in one prompt is overwhelming for you and for the AI. A better workflow:

1. First prompt: the homepage. Hero, key message, one CTA.
2. Once the homepage feels right: "now add a menu page with sections for breakfast, lunch, drinks."
3. Once that's there: "now add a reservation form that pings WhatsApp."

Each step gives the AI new context to build on. It's also easier to revise — if the menu page needs a tweak, you just fix that page, not the whole site.

What to avoid

• "Make it look professional." Means nothing. Show a reference site instead.
• "Add some images." Tell it what images, or it'll use stock placeholders.
• "Use my brand colours." Give the hex codes.
• "Make it pop." Marketing-speak from 2008. Describe what you actually want.

Keep iterating

The first build is rarely the final one. Read it back, find what's wrong, prompt the fix. "The hero is too quiet — make the headline twice as big." "The reservation form should ask for party size, not just date." The chat is where the work happens, not just the first send.

If you're brand new to this and want to see what a good site looks like before writing your first prompt, browse our design gallery — every site there was built from a chat prompt by someone like you. Or read about what vibe coding actually is if the term is new.

Ready to try? Open the chat and write a real brief. The AI will surprise you.