Every dealer who has ever picked a website template has had the same moment. You scroll the gallery, you find the one that is closest, and you accept it. Then you spend the next six months working around the bits that were built for somebody else's business. The hero panel wants a lifestyle photograph you do not have. The layout assumes you sell forty cars when you sell nine, or nine when you sell four hundred. The typeface says family runaround and you sell prestige, or the other way about.
Nobody ever chose that template. They settled for it.
The AI theme builder is our answer to that. You describe your dealership in plain sentences, and it designs a theme around what you said. Not a template you adapt to. A theme built to your brief.
Two ways in
There are two doors into this, and they suit different dealers.
Choose a theme. We have eighteen core themes, each a properly designed starting point rather than a colour swap of the last one. Pick one, put your colours, your typeface and your logo on it, and you are done. If you know what you want and you can see it in the gallery, this is the fast road.
Describe a theme. Tell the builder about the business and it designs a bespoke theme from scratch. This is the one to use when nothing in the gallery is quite you, or when you have a clear idea in your head and no way to draw it.
Both end in the same place: a real website with your stock on it. The difference is where the design comes from, and which plan you need. Choosing a theme is on every plan including the free one. Describing a bespoke theme is on the paid plans, and there is more on that at the end.
What "describe your dealership" actually means
This is the part dealers assume will be hard, and it is not, because the builder is not asking you to speak design.
It wants three things. The marques you specialise in. How you want to come across. What your buyers care about.
Plain sentences do the job. "We sell German prestige, mostly three to six years old, to buyers who have done their research and want to be treated like adults." That is a brief. So is "family cars under eight grand, part exchange welcome, we want to look approachable and local rather than slick."
There is no form full of design jargon, no colour theory, no asking you to pick between two words you would never use out loud. Write how you would explain the business to somebody in the pub, and the builder does the translation.
We have written the longer version of this in how to write the brief for your dealer website, because the brief is the single biggest lever on what you get back.
Point it at a starting place
This step is optional, and it is the one that surprises people.
You can give the builder the site you are currently on. It reads your existing pages for tone, for the services you offer, for the selling points you have already worked out over years of trading. All the wording you wrote at two in the morning when you first set the business up, the thing about the hundred-point check, the line about seven days a week. It comes with you.
Or you can name a site you admire and let the builder take its cue from that.
If you are moving from another provider, that first option is the difference between a migration and a rebuild. The full argument is in moving your dealer website without losing what works.
What arrives is a working site, not a picture of one
This is the bit worth being clear about, because plenty of tools will show you a mockup.
The theme arrives on a working website, with your stock, your details and every page a car buyer expects. Minutes, not weeks. You can open it, click into a car, fill in a form, and it behaves.
Your stock, live. Every vehicle with its photos, price, mileage and full specification, pulled from the stock you already manage in the dealer management system. You are not typing cars in twice.
Ways to enquire. Enquiry forms on every vehicle, a finance application, part exchange valuations, and contact details that actually reach you rather than an inbox nobody opens.
Finance, properly. A full application the buyer completes one step at a time, instead of a wall of forty questions that loses them at question nine.
Compare and save. Buyers can shortlist vehicles and put them side by side, the way they already browse on the big portals. If that is the habit they arrive with, the site should not fight it.
Edit by pointing at it
Once it is there, changing it is not a project.
Click the heading and change the heading. Swap the photo by clicking the photo. Reword the promise you are no longer comfortable making. There is no separate editor to learn and no ticket to raise, and the change is on the page in front of you rather than in a settings panel three screens away.
For everything else you might want to move, add or restyle, our guide to customising a car dealer website covers the wider editor, and content blocks covers adding your own sections.
Publish when you say so, and roll back if you change your mind
Nothing goes live until you say so. Ask for changes in plain language, see a new version, keep looking.
And an earlier version can be restored in a click. That matters more than it sounds. The reason dealers stop editing their own websites is not that editing is hard, it is that they broke something once and nobody could tell them how to put it back. If getting back is one click, you will actually try things.
Checked before you see it
Every generated site is checked against what a working dealership website has to do. Where something is wrong, it is corrected and checked again before it reaches you.
When a check cannot be satisfied, you get told what the problem is in plain English, not handed a list of faults to interpret.
One example, because it is the one that comes up most. If your brand colour would be hard to read against the theme you have chosen, the site says so and offers a nearby shade that works. Your colour, still recognisably yours, but legible to the buyer squinting at their phone in a car park. The full account of what gets checked is in what we check before an AI-built site reaches you.
We describe that process as thorough rather than infallible, and we mean it. Look at your site before you publish it. It is your name on the sign.
A few honest limits
The builder designs a theme. It does not know your trading history, your best month, or the fact that the photo of the forecourt was taken before you resurfaced it. Anything that depends on facts only you hold is still yours to supply.
A vague brief produces a generic theme. The builder can only work with what you tell it, and "we sell cars" describes every dealership in the country.
And it is a starting point that you are expected to push on. The dealers who end up with the best sites are the ones who look at version one, say what is wrong with it, and ask again.
Which plan it is on
The two doors are not on the same plan, so it is worth knowing which is which before you start.
Choosing a theme is on every plan, the free one included. All eighteen core themes, your colours, your typeface, your logo, and you can switch between them later without losing your content. The free plan lists up to five vehicles on your own domain with no card required, alongside the dealer management system itself, so you can put real cars into a real site and spend nothing.
Describing a bespoke theme is a paid feature. Plans start at £49 a month, which is also where marketplace feeds, payments and finance come in.
That split is a reasonable way to approach it either way. Go in on free with a core theme and five cars to find out whether the platform suits how you work. If you get there and nothing in the gallery is quite your dealership, the bespoke route is waiting on the other side of it.
If you have been meaning to replace a site you never liked, this is a short afternoon rather than a project. Start at the AI theme builder, or browse the eighteen core themes first if you would rather see before you describe.
