Blog redesign with AI
One of the best ways to keep up to date with all progress in AI is to use the latest products.
Last week I finally got around to redesigning my blog, something I'd been meaning to do for a while. I use Ghost as my content management system, which functions as the backend for my blog. For the frontend, Ghost offers design templates and also allows users to upload their own custom designs.
When I was initially setting up my blog, I didn't like any of the existing templates and wanted a design of my own. The problem was that I don't have any design or coding skills, so I worked with a designer and developer to help me. The designer handled the visual design, the developer handled the implementation, and together they created a custom design file I could upload to Ghost.
This time around I wanted to see how far I could get entirely on my own with the help of AI. So instead of turning to a designer and a developer, I turned to Lovable and Claude Code.
I first prompted Lovable by sharing a screenshot of my blog's current design and specifying the high-level stylistic changes I wanted. Lovable produced a new design based on my input, and I liked the direction. From there I had a back and forth with Lovable to fine-tune the specifics and relatively quickly arrived at a design I liked.
Lovable generates both the visual design and the underlying code, which I exported to Github. The issue I encountered at this point was that the format of the Lovable export wasn't accepted by Ghost.
To solve this, I uploaded the file created by the developer for my current blog design, which was in the Ghost-compatible format and then asked Claude to take the new design from Lovable and convert it into the same format as the existing design file.
This took the most time. The 80/20 rule definitely applies (the last 20% takes 80% of the time) but Claude's capabilities are truly incredible. I ran into daily usage limits for a couple of days, but ultimately after some back and forth I had the product I wanted. Claude generated code that resembled the Lovable design and could be uploaded to Ghost.
The entire process took no longer than a week and cost me pro tier subscriptions on Lovable ($50/month) and Claude ($20/month). For my previous design, I paid an order of magnitude more for both the designer and developer, and it took a lot longer.
Apart from getting this done faster and cheaper, what I like about this setup is that I'm in full control. Any small or large-scale changes I want to make to the blog I can now do myself. As someone that isn't versed in any of the design tools and doesn't code, this is incredibly empowering.