Building a killer website is crucial to almost any enterprise. The visuals, layout and branding of a webpage are vital to luring the right customers in, especially for ecommerce websites. A detail as seemingly insignificant as the placement of the “Add to Basket” button can have a tangible impact on sales, and the chief way of measuring that impact currently is through A/B testing- this is where The Grid comes in.
Sites like WordPress have made taking the hassle out of website building into a multi-million dollar industry, but none have achieved the level of simplicity to which The Grid aspires. They aim to use machine learning to let websites build themselves, and then tweak and rebuild themselves based on how your audience interacts with your website.
“We want to make the experience more fun,” says The Grid founder and CEO Dan Tocchini. “I think the key to that is focusing on the content. It’s what all the people [users] do, just focus on the content.”
Content is one of the key ingredients the user must provide for The Grid in order to cook up their webpage. You give the text, images and videos, and The Grid automatically picks the colours for your new layout from the visual content you upload. There’s also a facial recognition algorithm ensuring that if your photos are cropped, nobody gets left out of the picture. You also define a purpose for your content, based on what you’re trying to improve- more followers? More clicks? Larger crowdfunding? But beyond this, The Grid does all of the work.
Of course, The Grid is still in its early days- the team are still working tirelessly to fine-tune the code, algorithms and design features. For the time being, it falls to The Grid’s creative director Leigh Taylor to step in if something goes seriously awry with the layout. “The designers are in-the-loop with the AI,” says Taylor. “They interact with it, guide it, influence it to shape a framework of design that facilitates multiple user cases beyond what is feasible with just two hands.”
The Grid is still currently in crowdfunding mode, but if you want a preview of just how smart their system is, look no further than The Grid’s own website. They plugged in the text and images, and let the product do the rest. If this is the kind of technology they can bring to the masses in the coming months, their future certainly looks bright.
Read more here.
(Image credit: The Grid)
