How to Build Animated Websites With AI (3-Step Cycle)
How to Build Animated Websites With AI (3-Step Cycle)
You can build animated websites with AI that don't look like generic slop by running one simple loop over and over: find inspiration, clone it with Claude Code, then iterate. I use this exact cycle to go from a website I admire to a finished build with a real animated hero section. It works at the big-picture level (what should the whole site feel like?) and at the tiny level (how should this one component behave?). Here's the entire process, the specific tools, and how to set it up yourself.
Most people try to build a good-looking site by dumping a screenshot into an AI and hoping it can go from a fuzzy vision to a polished build. That's where the "AI slop" look comes from. The fix isn't a better prompt. It's a better process.
What Is the 3-Step Cycle for Building Websites With AI?
The cycle is three moves you repeat endlessly:
- Find inspiration — decide the general vibe and aesthetic you're going for.
- Invoke the right skills — give Claude Code the tools it needs to actually execute, not just guess.
- Iterate — refine at both the whole-site level and the individual-component level.
The key insight: you run this same loop at every scale. You use it to decide what the entire website should look like, and you use it again to decide how a single hero section or button should behave. Do we have inspiration for this component? Do we have a skill to build it? Repeat, on and on.
This is the opposite of the one-shot approach. You're not asking AI to nail everything in a single prompt. You're building a repeatable system.
Where Do You Find Website Design Inspiration?
Start big picture. Before you touch any code, get clear on the general aesthetic. To do that, you need to know where to look. Three places I go:
- Twitter (X) — designers constantly post their work and link the live site.
- Pinterest — good for broad visual direction and mood.
- Landbook — my favorite, because it usually links you straight to the actual live website, not just a screenshot.
That last point matters more than it sounds. On Landbook I found finn.com, which has a very cool animation going on. On Twitter I found another site with a striking hero — an almost statue-like figure with parallax movement. Both spoke to me instantly.
Here's the thing about finding inspiration: it's genuinely hard and time-consuming when you're starting out. So don't let good references evaporate.
Build a "Taste Library" So You Never Lose a Good Reference
If you're going to do front-end design more than once, start your own taste library. When you find a site you love, you shouldn't use it once and never see it again — you want to be able to call on it later, or just get your mind turning on a new project.
I built an entire taste vault where I catalog every cool website and design I come across, and it lives right on my computer. Setting one up is stupid simple: take screenshots or grab the links of sites you like, hand them to Claude Code, and say "Hey, can you create some sort of library for me?" It takes about 5 minutes.
How Do You Clone a Website's Design With Claude Code?
The standard advice is to take a bunch of screenshots and feed them to the AI. That can work — screenshots are fine as a loose reference. But you can do a lot better if you have the actual URL.
With a real URL, Claude Code can look at the code under the hood and recreate the site pixel by pixel, animations and all. I do this with a skill I built called clone-site (invoked with /clone-site). You point it at a URL and it breaks down the entire website — including all the animation — and gives you an essentially identical rebuild running on your local dev server.
When I ran it against that statue site (the "plinth" reference) and against finn.com, the local builds came back as near one-for-one recreations. Side by side, you would not spot a meaningful difference.
Let me be direct, because someone always misreads this: cloning a site is not about ripping it off. The goal is never "recreate it pixel by pixel and call it yours." The goal is to use a design you admire as a foundation — a base to modify heavily and turn into something of your own. It's far easier to make something great when you're starting from a solid scaffold instead of a blank page and a hopeful prompt.
So step one is finding inspiration on the web. Step two is using a skill like clone-site to pull that reference in and start building off it.
How Do You Add an Animated Video Hero With AI?
A still image or basic parallax wasn't enough for me — I wanted actual movement in the hero section. That means putting a real video behind the hero. Claude Code can't generate video on its own, so this is where you bring in outside tools.
The best tool for AI video right now is Seedance 2.5. The workflow is straightforward:
- Start with a base reference image. This becomes the first frame of the video, so you're not relying on a text prompt to hallucinate the whole thing from scratch.
- Generate that image with an image model — I used Seedream 5, but Nano Banana Pro or GPT Image work too.
- Drive the whole thing through Claude Code via the Higgsfield MCP, so you never have to leave your editor to generate assets by hand.
Setting up the Higgsfield MCP is easy: go to higgsfield.ai, head to the MCP and CLI section, copy the setup prompt, and paste it into Claude Code. It installs the MCP plus the requisite skills for you.
Composition Matters: Leave Dead Space
When you generate the hero image, think about layout first. My hero keeps text on the left, so I pushed the subject — a statue-like figure holding a glowing, orb-like object — over to the right, leaving a ton of dead space on that side for the copy.
The dead space is the whole trick. If your composition puts the subject in the middle with a banner below, you'd center it instead. Either way, give it room to breathe. You don't want the animation to overwhelm the page — its job is to accentuate, not to be the entire point.
Keep the Motion Subtle
Going from image to video is simple. You tell Claude Code: use Seedance 2.5, use the reference image you created, generate a video for the landing page, and then describe the motion. In my build, the orb just glows and gives off a faint pulse of light.
Subtle is better. Anything more than a gentle motion becomes distracting on a hero page. Less is more here — a small amount of movement adds real "oomph" without pulling focus from your message.
How Do You Turn a Cloned Site Into Your Own?
At this point you've got two assets: a pixel-accurate rebuild of your reference site you can edit however you want, and a video hero to drop into it. Now you smash them together and iterate — and you don't have to guess how.
I packed the iteration process into a second skill, remix-site (/remix-site), which ships in the same GitHub repo as clone-site. The flow looks like this:
- Tell Claude Code to insert the video into the hero and fix the placeholder copy so it reflects your product (in my demo, a fictional AI analytics company).
- Run
/remix-site. It asks you two questions: amplitude and anchors. - Amplitude = how different should the variations be from the original? Small tweaks or a big departure?
- Anchors = specific aesthetic references. Without anchors, it stays close to the original and mostly adjusts color, type, and spacing. With anchors — like "go look at my taste vault and pull three very different styles" — you get real variation, and it can even call the Higgsfield MCP to generate new assets.
When I asked for big amplitude plus three anchors from my taste vault, it produced three distinct directions on a single page so I could scroll through and compare:
- Monolith — much darker, with new dithered mono-style assets. My favorite of the three.
- Clima — a green-and-orange look with clouds. Loved the color accents, wasn't sold on the green background.
- A third graph-background variant with cool new body assets.
Seeing all three directions on one page is the real unlock, especially if you don't come from a design background. It's hard to imagine these changes in your head — you need to see them. And you're not limited to three; run as many variations with as many anchors as you want. The point is to brainstorm and test until you land on something you actually want.
How Do You Fine-Tune the Final Design?
Once I picked Monolith (and told it to bring the real video back in, not just the still), remix-site opened a granular tweaks panel on the right. Honestly, it goes deeper than what you'd get natively in the Claude desktop app. From there you can:
- Adjust the grain of the video and the reach of the black gradient overlay.
- Nudge the video brightness (I like bumping it slightly).
- Shuffle every setting at once to explore, or apply presets like pitch black, soft studio, loud, watermark.
- Control page spacing and the reveal stagger — how elements animate in on load.
You can still prompt Claude directly at any time. For big sweeping changes, prompting is easiest; for dialing in the details, the panel wins because you can see the effect immediately. I also added a dither effect to the body to break up the pure black — a quick prompt, then a slider tweak to pull it back to the margins.
And don't reserve your front-end skills for the start of a project. Skills like impeccable and the taste skill can be brought in at any point — even deep into a build you've already iterated on heavily.
One More Thing: Mobile
Should mobile users get the video? Probably not. The simple solution is to serve the video to desktop and the still image to mobile. That way an older phone isn't struggling to render a heavy hero. And for motion in general, you get the most bang for your buck in how elements enter the page — that weighty feeling of content sliding in from the top or side.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best AI tool for generating website hero videos?
Seedance 2.5 is the strongest AI video model for this right now. Pair it with a base reference image generated in Seedream 5, Nano Banana Pro, or GPT Image, and drive the whole workflow through Claude Code using the Higgsfield MCP so you never leave your editor.
Is cloning a website with AI legal or ethical?
The intent matters. Cloning a site pixel-by-pixel just to pass it off as your own isn't the point. The right use is to treat an admired design as a foundation — a scaffold you modify heavily with your own copy, assets, and aesthetic until it becomes something distinct.
Do I need design experience to build a good-looking site with AI?
No. The whole reason the remix step generates multiple variations on one page is that most people can't picture design directions in their head — they need to see them. Comparing three concrete options side by side lets non-designers make strong aesthetic calls.
How do I stop AI-built websites from looking generic?
Don't one-shot it. Start from a real reference you admire, clone its actual code instead of guessing from screenshots, then iterate deliberately with variations and a tweak panel. The process — inspiration, skills, iteration — is what separates a custom site from AI slop.
Should I show video hero sections to mobile users?
Usually not. Serve the animated video to desktop and fall back to the static hero image on mobile. This prevents performance issues on older phones while keeping the premium look for desktop visitors.
If you want to go deeper into building with AI, join the free Chase AI community for templates, prompts, and live breakdowns. And if you're serious about building with AI, check out the paid community, Chase AI+, for hands-on guidance on how to make money with AI.
