A step-by-step walkthrough: from business idea to published, SEO-ready website in under five minutes using Vella's AI design intelligence engine.
Most small business owners have the same website story: they hired someone in 2019 for $3,500, the site looks dated, the copy is three owners old, and nobody has logged in to update it in eighteen months.
Vella rebuilds that story in five minutes. Here's exactly how to do it.
Step 1 — Start with a real description, not a brief (30 seconds)
Go to the /generate page and paste in a paragraph that a real person would actually say about your business. Not a marketing brief. Not keywords. A description.
Something like:
We're a family-owned Italian restaurant in downtown Raleigh. Open since 2011. Best known for wood-fired pizza and homemade pasta. Takeout and delivery are a big part of the business. We have a patio.
Vella's design intelligence engine reads that paragraph and extracts the category, brand mood, and customer type automatically. You don't need to pick a template. You don't need to fill in 40 form fields.
Step 2 — Pick a product category (20 seconds)
Vella shows you a short list of categories — Restaurant, SaaS, Healthcare, E-commerce, Services, etc. Tap the closest match.
Behind the scenes, this is doing three things at once:
- Selecting a color palette tuned for your industry
- Selecting a typography pair proven to convert in that category
- Applying a UI reasoning rule — the unwritten design rules that make a restaurant site feel like a restaurant and a SaaS site feel like a SaaS
This is the part that makes Vella-generated sites not look like AI-generated sites.
Step 3 — Let the AI design intelligence engine resolve the spec (60 seconds)
This is the magic step, and you don't do anything during it. Vella runs the resolver that matches your prompt + category against its design intelligence library and produces a full spec:
- Hero layout
- Section structure (Features, Process, Testimonials, CTA)
- Color tokens
- Type pairing
- Copy written in your brand voice
- Placeholder imagery
You'll see a live preview appear section by section. If you don't love a palette or a typography pair, you can swap it in one click.
Step 4 — Review the preview and edit live (90 seconds)
The preview page is interactive. Hover any section and you get an edit button. Change the headline, swap the image, rewrite a CTA — every change persists in real time.
If you hate the whole thing, hit Regenerate and Vella will produce a fresh spec with a different design angle.
Most users find a version they love within the first or second generation. Power users generate three variations and compose the best sections from each.
Step 5 — Publish (30 seconds)
Hit Publish. Vella provisions a live site, sets up the DNS records in your dashboard, and gives you a preview URL. Connect a custom domain whenever you're ready — it takes two DNS records.
That's it. Start to finish: under five minutes.
What you actually get
You don't just get a landing page. Every Vella-generated site ships with:
- A full section structure (Hero, Features, Process, Testimonials, CTA)
- Real copy written for your specific business
- Mobile-responsive layout
- SEO basics: title, description, semantic headings, alt text
- Sitemap + robots.txt
- Open Graph tags for social sharing
What happens after the 5 minutes
This is where Vella diverges from the old AI website-builder narrative. The 5-minute version is a starting point, not the finish. Once you publish, the site is yours to edit forever — or Vella's AI agent keeps improving it for you as traffic patterns change.
In other words: you start with a good website in 5 minutes, and it quietly gets better every month after.
