How AI Picks the Perfect UI Theme for Your Business Website
How AI Picks the Perfect UI Theme for Your Business Website
TL;DR: We taught our AI to be a design consultant. It now analyzes your business, understands your brand personality, and picks the perfect UI theme from 32 options—complete with detailed rationale. No more “which color scheme?” anxiety for small business owners.
The Problem: Design Decisions Don’t Scale
Here’s the thing about building websites for small businesses: everyone wants their site to “look professional” but few can articulate what that means. Should a plumbing company use the business theme or corporate? What about luxury vs. retro for a vintage boutique?
We were generating entire websites with AI—business research, content, layouts—but hitting a wall at the design layer. Sure, we could pick a random theme, but that felt… wrong. Like showing up to a black-tie event in jeans because “clothes are clothes.”
The Insight: Themes Are Business Decisions, Not Just Aesthetics
The breakthrough came when we stopped thinking about themes as color palettes and started treating them as business positioning statements.
A law firm choosing between corporate and business isn’t just picking colors—they’re signaling trust, professionalism, and authority. A coffee shop picking retro vs. cupcake is telling customers whether they’re quirky-artisan or modern-minimal.
So we asked: What if the AI that researches the business could also make this design decision?
How It Works: From Business Research to Theme Selection
Step 1: Deep Business Understanding
Our brand strategy step already analyzes:
- Industry and target audience
- Brand personality (playful vs. serious, innovative vs. traditional)
- Competitive positioning
- Core values and messaging
Step 2: Theme Intelligence Database
We built detailed profiles for all 32 DaisyUI themes:
{
name: 'corporate',
description: 'Professional, trustworthy, enterprise-grade...',
bestFor: [
'B2B services',
'Professional services',
'Enterprise software'
],
personality: ['professional', 'trustworthy', 'serious'],
industries: ['legal', 'finance', 'consulting']
}
Step 3: AI-Powered Matching
The AI receives:
- Complete business research
- Current brand strategy
- All 32 theme options with descriptions
And generates:
- Primary theme choice
- Detailed rationale explaining why
- Specific ways the theme supports brand goals
Example output for a plumbing company:
Theme: business
Rationale: The ‘business’ theme strikes the perfect balance for a service-based trades business. It conveys professionalism and reliability without feeling overly corporate. The clean, straightforward design aligns with the brand’s emphasis on transparent pricing and no-nonsense service. The blue tones naturally associate with water and trust, while maintaining excellent readability for emergency contact information.
The Technical Implementation
Prompt Engineering That Works
We spent hours refining the prompt. The key was being specific about what good theme selection looks like:
Consider:
1. Industry appropriateness
2. Target audience expectations
3. Brand personality alignment
4. Emotional resonance
5. Competitive differentiation
Validation & Fallbacks
- TypeScript interfaces ensure valid theme names
- Default to
businessif AI returns invalid theme - Log all theme selections for continuous improvement
Dynamic Theme Application
The magic happens in our HTML templates:
<html data-theme="{{theme}}">
DaisyUI handles the rest—colors, shadows, borders, everything updates automatically. One attribute change, complete design transformation.
The Results: Design Decisions in Milliseconds
Before: Manual theme selection, subjective, time-consuming After: AI analyzes business → selects theme → explains reasoning. Takes ~2 seconds.
Real examples from production:
- Luxury real estate →
luxurytheme - Family law practice →
corporatetheme - Vintage clothing store →
retrotheme - Tech startup →
synthwavetheme - Kids’ daycare →
cupcaketheme
Every single choice has a detailed rationale. Every choice feels right.
Why This Matters for SMBs
Small business owners shouldn’t need to be designers. They shouldn’t agonize over color theory or brand positioning. They should focus on running their business.
By encoding design expertise into our AI, we’re democratizing access to professional design decisions. A solo plumber in San Diego gets the same level of design thinking as a Bay Area startup with a design team.
The Startup Lesson: Let AI Make Domain-Specific Decisions
Here’s what we learned building this:
1. AI is great at pattern matching
Once we gave it structured theme data + business context, the matches were consistently good.
2. Explainability builds trust
Users might not understand why business beats corporate, but when the AI explains it, they get it.
3. Constraints enable creativity
Limiting to 32 curated themes (vs. infinite color possibilities) made the AI more decisive and accurate.
4. Domain expertise scales through code
We interviewed designers, codified their thinking, now every website generation includes that expertise.
What’s Next
We’re exploring:
- Custom theme generation: AI creates themes from scratch
- A/B testing themes: Let data decide which converts better
- Dynamic theme switching: Different themes for different user segments
- Theme evolution: AI suggests theme updates as brands mature
But for now? We’ve solved the “which theme?” problem. One less decision for small business owners. One more way AI handles the complexity.
Want to see it in action? Try WebZum—tell us about your business, watch the AI pick your perfect theme. Or browse our theme showcase to see all 32 options with AI-generated rationales.
Building something similar? Key takeaway: Give your AI structured choices with rich metadata. Don’t ask it to freestyle—give it a menu and let it explain the selection.
The future of design isn’t replacing designers—it’s making design decisions accessible to everyone.