// This Episode
JEN_AI tries to make a website that creates dream homepages, using AI wizardry and a few clicks. We reflect on chasing and creating our dreams vs. longing for home.
// The Challenge
JEN_AI Challenge #10: Use AI to spawn a website-making website.
This week I found myself with a wishlist of website projects for friends, family and myself, each in need of an initial placeholder / basic homepage, and wondered - “Can I join forces with the AI-coding-overlords to distill personal & business websites down to their most essential elements and create a website that creates websites (or landing pages) with a slick, simple design?”
Let’s find out.
// What is JEN_AI?
If you’re new here, welcome! I’m Jenni Munroe, and the JEN_AI program is a series of experimental creativity challenges where humans use generative artificially intelligent (or GenAI) machines to learn, to co-create content and channel the future while taking liberties with words and obscure(d) references. Let’s Jenerate!
// AI Tools Used
In the “Build Something Good” JEN_AI episode we used AI tools to “vibecode” - you tell an AI agent what you want it to build, then watch the tool code it for you, and steer it a bit. The more comfortable you are with tech, the easier it is to ask for what you actually want and fix things that break, but I would still recommend it to a never-coder for a taste of that tingly-magical feeling of typing words and watching things move, come alive. (When I was a kid discovering coding it truly felt like I was learning to do magic.)
I’ve used Replit again for vibecoding, but there are many others, like Cursor, or code-specialized tools from the Big (Chat)Bots like Claude Code from Anthropic. They usually have monthly fees or a free tier option. Website hosting providers also typically now have AI tools where you can type in what you want, hope for the best, and then edit it. If in doubt, ask a chatbot? Or not.
I also like to brainstorm with ChatGPT to generate prompts to give Replit to kick off the vibecoding, which can help you get a better shot at asking for the right thing upfront or explicitly mentioning things you might have missed.
// JEN_AI’s jenai.com site is almost conscious
The JEN_AI site is now technically live at jenai.com, but plenty of fixes, tweaks and surprises to come soon. This was vibecoded using Replit but has a few more style features than the current No Page Like Home. (Am I too obsessed with light mode / dark mode toggles?)
// Try it: No Page Like Home webpage-creator
“Has the dream of owning a home become a nightmare? Worry not! With No Page Like Home you can have a digital home online, where we’re spending all our time anyway.”
Yeah, not the best advertising campaign, scrap that.
The vision-vibe I was shooting for was:
Imagine someone is looking to level up their personal or business brand. Maybe they are applying for jobs or are working on a side-hustle, small business, or startup, and they want almost a placeholder that is a quick, easy, professionally designed initial website of their own. A simple homepage - their own home on the web - almost a “digital business card” to start with - that succinctly showcases what they can do, but doesn’t require faffing around with tech or templates or whatever. These people already have a presence on few different social media platforms but don’t have a cool, visual, central digital-profile-kind-of-website that acts as their style-forward front door, pointing people to their favourite more in-depth “showcase” or “connection” platforms (such as LinkedIn, Instagram, GitHub, Medium etc.). It needs to be quick, easy & fun to create, look cool and feel like home.
So I did some research, looking around at simple personal brand and business landing-page websites and also asked ChatGPT to distill the bare-essential elements:
Name and Professional Title
Blurb: Tagline, Brief Bio or Value Proposition
Visuals: Photo, Portfolio/Work Samples
Contact Info / Social Media
Other suggestions (maybe later):
Endorsements / Testimonials
Call-To-Action (e.g. a button for what you want visitors to do next like subscribe to your newsletter)
If you want to check out the No Page Like Home webpage creator, which creates a single landing page for yourself or your business (think digital business card) there are some sneak peeks here or head to nopagelikehome.com. Warning: it’s in demo-mode, beware!
The way it works currently is: you enter or generate some info about you and some images, (or you can click ‘Example’ to pre-populate), and it will mock those up into a slick site “card” in a choice of 3 different style options (which you can instantly click to preview). Whether you’re into rainbow or you’re over it 🌈 there’s something that looks good. When you’ve got something you like, you click ‘Make it Real’ to publish that to a real web page. Real talk here though - this prototype demo is basic AF. I have a long list of basic and wishlist updates to make (e.g. auto-filling suggested content based on e.g. info from your linkedin/instagram edited with generative AI). Suggestions are also welcomed!
First up, I’m using No Page Like Home to create a new landing site for my mother’s textile art making and teaching business, she greenlit the preview today :)
If you just came for the AI experiments - that’s all folks! If you’re in the mood for some RealJen life-overshare, hang tight.
// GEAR CHANGE: RealJen Reflecting on dreams, homes and human life
Moving to California in 2019 was something my husband and I had long dreamed of. But two things happened that we didn’t expect: a pregnancy, and a pandemic. We found ourselves starting a new family in country that our old families couldn’t enter for what turned out to be around 20 months.
We were embraced by kind neighbours. I found a community of inspiring, successful, brilliant mamas and we wore masks while our babies played on picnic blankets spaced apart, in golden parks where it almost never rained.
In so many ways, it was a dream come true. We built and gave birth to a new life, a new home, started new jobs, made new friends.
But, raising a kid takes a village. We missed our UK family and friends. My grandma died. More than one of my mama-friends lost their own mothers, one very suddenly. We were blessed with a second child. As I struggled to raise my two sons a creeping panic grew inside me: I can’t miss another precious year of my family’s lives. Despite all the upheaval it would cause, and the life & friends we hated to have to leave behind, it was time to go home.
This Sunday is Mother’s Day in the UK, a day which can trigger a range of emotions depending on your circumstances. This year is my mother’s first year without her mother (my other grandmother, who recently passed). I’m grateful for the year of quality time I had with my maternal Grandma in the UK and for getting to say goodbye. And I’m so grateful for the loved ones who are still here, as we start a new life, again, with our beautiful third new life- our little girl. I’m grateful for the privilege, the opportunity, to chase our Californian dream, but there’s no place like home, and I can’t believe how incredibly lucky I am that it was, mostly, still here when I came back.
(So I’ll take this precious opportunity to give my mum a dodgy homemade present, in this case a website, for Mother’s Day, not so different from the homemade cards my boys will give me. Don’t worry there are flowers and cake too.)
// JEN_AI Playlist - this week’s theme songs:
No California by Ilsey The sound of living The American Dream while missing someone you love.
Over the Rainbow by Susan Boyle Move over, Ariana- SuBo dreamed a dream. Britain’s got talent, and -though it’s far from perfect- I’m grateful it’s still Great (tho there’s nothing less British than admitting it). Today we’re choosing your Scottish Nan over Hollywood Glam.
// Feedback & Thanks
As always thanks for reading & for sharing your feedback on how this could be better. Keep it coming! We’re attempting a “shorter” newsletter (lol fail, better luck next time!), every 2 weeks, in favour of better JEN_AI projects and less inbox spam. If you like a version you can listen to while doing something useful- try the podcast.
// References
In “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy and co seek out a fake wizard and abilities they already possess but aren’t able to fully realise. At the end, Dorothy clicks her heels together and says “There’s No Place Like Home”. At the recent Oscars, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo performed songs from Wizard of Oz adaptations, including “Over the Rainbow”. Their movie version of the “Wicked” Oz musical received 10 nominations and won 2 Oscars for Design.
Whether you came here hoping to find intelligence, heart, courage, or you just got lost, JEN_AI has it all! Maybe. But more importantly, so do you.
All views are my own (or maybe a chatbot’s, or yours?). JEN_AI was produced on a Google employee’s (unpaid) parental leave and is not endorsed by Google.
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