AI agents (MCP)
Build and maintain a website with an AI agent
Once an agent is connected, it can build a site from a description and keep it up to date afterwards. The building part gets the attention; the maintenance part is where it saves you the most time.
Give it the brief, not the instructions
Agents work better from a description of the business than from a list of pages. Something like:
Build a site for a two-person landscape gardening business in Utrecht. Services, a gallery, an about page and a contact form. Warm, earthy, not corporate. Photos come later — leave sensible placeholders.
The agent will decide the structure, write the copy and set up the design. You correct it afterwards, which is faster than specifying everything up front.
The order that works
If you are watching it work, this is the sequence you want to see:
- Create the site.
- Set the brand — a few colours become a full palette that everything else draws from.
- Set the fonts.
- Create the shared layout — the navigation and footer that every page uses.
- Then build pages.
Step 4 is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that matters. Pages built before a shared layout exists come out with no navigation and no footer. If your first look at a new site shows bare page content floating on its own, this is why — ask the agent to create the layout and apply it to the existing pages.
If you are asking an agent to build a whole site in one go, it does no harm to say: "set up the brand and the shared layout before you build any pages."
Ask for drafts, then publish
New pages can be created hidden. That is what you want for anything substantial:
Build the pricing page as a draft. I'll look before it goes live.
Then review and publish. Note that a page needs both a URL and a visibility setting before the public can reach it — if an agent asks you about a slug or whether a page should be live, that is why, and it is worth answering rather than saying "whatever you think".
Let it look at its own work
The agent can render a page and see the result. This changes what you can ask for:
Take a screenshot of the homepage and tell me what looks off.
The hero feels cramped on mobile. Look at it and fix the spacing.
Without this it is guessing about layout. With it, "make the spacing more generous" is a request it can actually evaluate. If an agent has built you something and not looked at it, ask it to.
Maintenance: the part worth automating
This is where a connected agent beats a one-shot site generator, because it can find things across a whole site rather than regenerating pages.
Jobs it handles well:
- Site-wide corrections. "The phone number changed to 030 555 0142 — find every place the old one appears and update it." It searches across pages rather than relying on you remembering where things are.
- Seasonal updates. "Everywhere it says 2025, make it 2026."
- Adding to an existing page. "Add an FAQ section to the pricing page, matching the style of the rest of the page."
- Precise edits. "Change the heading on the services page to 'What we do' — don't touch anything else." It edits that one element rather than rewriting the page.
- SEO tidying. "Check every page has a meta description, and write ones that are missing."
- Copy review. "Read the whole site and tell me where the tone is inconsistent." — then fix what you agree with.
Working with someone else in the editor
There is no locking. If you are editing a page in the browser while an agent edits the same page, the last save wins. Let it finish a page before you open it. If you keep the editor open on a page the agent is working on, you will see its changes appear live — which is a good way to watch the first session.
Review comments
An agent can read and write the comments pinned to elements in the editor's Comments panel. So you can leave feedback where you see the problem:
Read the open comments on the homepage, fix what they ask for, and reply on each one saying what you changed.
Comments an agent writes are badged as agent-written, so a mixed thread stays readable.
What it cannot do
Attaching a domain is not available to agents — that stays a manual step in the editor. See Is it safe? for the rest of the boundary.