Can you really build a website with ChatGPT and no coding knowledge?

July 9, 2023

Can I really build a website with ChatGPT very quickly without any coding knowledge? Plenty of Youtube videos and blogs seem to think they can show me how, but I suspect it's just clickbait. Let's take a look at these and find out if ChatGPT can really show us how to build a website with some real logic without any programming knowledge.

Let's look at our first example. This video promises to get the job done in 60 seconds: Make a website with #chatgpt in 60 seconds

That's a bold title. The video really is only 60 seconds, but curiously, the narrator says at the end, "This is how I used ChatGPT to create a website in just a few hours." A few hours? Oh, so there was a lot of editing going on in that video - specifically things being edited out! It does generate some real html code and that's kinda nice, but there is no logic. It's just a static HTML file.

That's a pattern I saw in a lot of these tutorials. They are just generating static html and opening the .html file in the browser. Below are some more examples of the same kind of thing.

So this isn't living up to my expectations. Where are the videos that show ChatGPT making a nice modern looking website with some interaction? It turns out, ChatGPT can be really useful for no-code solutions. That's right. A lot of the tutorials out there are just asking ChatGPT to make tell them how to use Wordpress or EditorX.

Here's a good example: How to Make a Website using ChatGPT 2023 (Full Tutorial). That title sounds very promising. It's a "Full Tutorial"! However, the website it produces is still quite basic, and it's only a Wordpress website. There's nothing very custom about it. It's only one page, but this videos does something a little interesting. It also shows you how to use Midjourney to create graphics for your website.

That's interesting! Still it's not what I was hoping for, and a good portion of it's content is just an ad for Hostinger. I found plenty of examples like this, and it speaks to the power of ChatGPT to sort-of google things for you and provide step-by-step instructions on how to use Wordpress and many other things. Here are some examples:

That last video is funny. It actually warns you against using ChatGPT to generate code because, according to the author, that's just too hard.

The interesting thing in all of the no-code tutorials is that prior to ChatGPT you would just Google these things. That's what ChatGPT is really doing for you. It's not a replacement for workers, it a replacement for Googling. It has the knowledge of the internet (a lot of it anyway), so you don't have to search, skip past the ads, click a link, determine if it's relevant, and repeat that process over and over. That was all acceptable - in fact, desirable - 20 years ago. Today it's drudgery. An AI chatbot can cut through all that nonsense and just give you the info you want in clear, easy to follow format.

Is there any reason to do it the old Google way anymore? ChatGPT is limited to the last time it was trained and sometimes it gives information that is out of date even when it knows the more up to date information. Still, that makes Google just a backup.

I'm still looking for an example of ChatGPT creating a dynamic website by generating custom code? I kept searching and found this video: Build a Complete Website Using ChatGPT in 1 Minute. It actually has some dynamic content using python and Flask. ChatGPT generates the code for him, but he uses the terminal and VS Code from his own knowledge. The end product is a website that can print out a random quotation when you click a button. It's not that impressive, and not exactly what I'm looking for. Oh and the title is a lie, by the way. The video is actually over 13 minutes long.

There are other examples of tutorials just like this. They all show you how to use ChatGPT to create a basic web page and run it locally on your computer. One of them has ChatGPT show you how to set up hosting.

Can we do any better than this? Are there any examples of generating a lot of code and a dynamic website?

In this example the video walks you through setting up a webpage using Tailwind. That's a little more sophisticated. But Keep in mind that the author already new what tailwind was. His first prompt was "Help me set up tailwind". So he had to know that first. How to Build a Website Using ChatGPT | Creating Website Using Chat GPT | Simplilearn)

Also interesting in this video is that he gets some incorrect installation instructions from ChatGPT (3:20). He only knew it was wrong because he already had experience with Tailwind and he checked the documentation.

Still that video did not show how to use ChatGPT to write anything sophisticated. It still only generated a static webpage. And that was one of the longest videos I found at more than 30 minutes.

Finally I found one resource that where a reddit user claimed to have made a website without any coding experience. Check out How I Built a Fully Functional Website with Zero Experience Using ChatGPT. The website is visible here: https://www.stringtone.com. As you can see it has some interaction. The website has more than one page and users can sign a guestbook. Yay! Real interactivity! According the the author it took him about two weeks of spare time work to complete this.

I couldn't find a single example of someone using ChatGPT to create an even slightly complex website, with real backend logic and no coding experience. In fact, even users with programming experience still had to lean on their skills. The most complex example took over two weeks and it was hardly any better than something that could be done with Wordpress.

The value of a programmer is the ability to create novel software products that can't be generated via a tool like Wordpress or Editor X. ChatGPT is still a powerful took, but the hype around it's capabilities seems to be coming down to more reasonable levels. It can't replace a thoughtful, skilled programmer. There's still one more example I want to look at. This website: JoeHuntBlog.com.

I used ChatGPT to create this. I have over a decade of professional experience developing websites, but still it took me a few days of spare time working to get this site up and running. It's built using NextJs and Tailwind, and it's deployed and hosted via Netlify. I had never used any of those tools before. I must say, ChatCPT made it a lot easier. The old "Read the docs and Google everything" way of developing would have taken a lot longer, but I couldn't have done it without years of experience and knowledge about programming, deploying and debugging.

Note: This blog post was also created with the help of ChatGPT. All the ideas are mine, but I used ChatGPT and it's awesome plugins to search to youtube video tutorials, and get feedback on my writing.