Writing effective prompts
The prompt is the one place a little detail pays off the most. Here's what to put in it — and what you can safely leave out.
Zitegen reads a plain-language description and builds a complete Astro site from it — pages, sections, copy, and styling. A good prompt isn't a spec and it isn't long. It just answers a few questions clearly enough that the first draft lands somewhere you'd recognize as yours, so you spend your time refining instead of starting over.
Three things every prompt needs
You don't need to describe every section. Give the AI these three and it has enough to build something deliberate rather than generic:
- What it is. The kind of site and its job — a portfolio, a restaurant page, a landing page for an app. This anchors the whole structure.
- Who it's for. The audience sets tone and hierarchy. A page for enterprise buyers reads nothing like one for wedding guests, even at the same word count.
- How it should feel. A few mood words — minimal and editorial, bold and colorful, calm and clinical — steer color, type, and density more than any single instruction about layout.
Trade adjectives for specifics
“Modern,” “clean,” and “professional” describe almost every site ever made, so they steer almost nothing. Concrete nouns do the work: name the sections you know you need, the feeling you're after, and anything non-negotiable. The more specific the input, the less the AI has to guess.
A portfolio for a motion designer in Tokyo — dark theme, full-bleed project reels, minimal top nav, and a contact block at the bottom. Confident and a little cinematic.
Notice what's doing the work there: a subject, a place, a theme, named sections, and a mood. None of it is long, and none of it is filler.
What you can leave out
Anything you don't mention, the AI makes a sensible call on — and everything is editable afterward. You don't need exact copy, hex codes, or a section-by-section outline to start. Three good sentences beat a three-paragraph brief that tries to lock down every detail up front.
Attach a reference for the look
Then let refinement do the rest
The first prompt costs 10 credits and takes a minute or two. It's a strong starting point, not a final answer — you shape the rest with follow-ups in chat, the visual editor, or the code editor, all editing the same project. So aim the prompt at getting the bones right, not at perfection in one shot.
A running start