Building React Websites in Minutes: A Comprehensive Guide Using AI

2025-02-27

Introduction: The Evolving Landscape of Web Development

The demand for efficient and rapid web development solutions is constantly growing, especially in the freelance market. Platforms like Upwork and Fiverr highlight this demand, with React developers commanding hourly rates between $25 and $50. For a typical project, this can translate to costs ranging from $2,500 to $55,000. Imagine being able to deliver the same high-quality results in significantly less time, allowing you to offer competitive freelance services and maximize your efficiency.

This chapter introduces Reloom, an innovative AI-powered website builder designed to streamline the process of creating React websites. We will explore how Reloom enables you to move from initial concept to a fully functional React application in mere minutes. By leveraging professional design systems and a vast React component library, Reloom empowers users to generate production-ready, responsive codebases with unprecedented speed.

Understanding Reloom: An AI-Powered Website Builder

Reloom is an AI website builder that dramatically accelerates the web development process. It distinguishes itself by:

AI-Driven Design and Generation: Reloom uses artificial intelligence to interpret your website requirements from simple prompts, automatically generating sitemaps, wireframes, and ultimately, React code.
React Framework Foundation: Reloom is specifically built to create websites using React, a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. This ensures the output is modern, maintainable, and scalable.

React: A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces or UI components. It allows developers to create reusable UI components and manage complex user interfaces effectively.
Professional Design System & Component Library: Reloom incorporates a professional design system and a comprehensive React component library with over 1,000 pre-built components. This library covers a wide range of UI elements and functionalities, ensuring consistent design and rapid prototyping.

Design System: A set of reusable components, guidelines, and patterns that define the visual language and user experience of a product or website. It ensures consistency and efficiency in design and development.

Component Library: A collection of reusable UI components, often built in frameworks like React, that developers can use to assemble user interfaces. These libraries accelerate development and promote consistency.
Focus on Speed and Efficiency: Reloom is engineered to drastically reduce development time, enabling users to build functional websites in a fraction of the time compared to traditional coding methods.
Responsiveness: Websites built with Reloom are inherently responsive, meaning they are designed to adapt and display correctly across various devices and screen sizes (desktops, tablets, and mobile phones).

Responsive Design: A web design approach that makes web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes. It ensures optimal viewing experience across desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.
Production-Ready Codebase: Reloom generates code that is intended to be used in live, operational websites. This “production-ready” aspect signifies that the code is of high quality, optimized for performance, and suitable for deployment.

Production-Ready: Refers to software or code that is sufficiently developed and tested to be deployed and used in a live, operational environment (production). It implies stability, performance, and reliability.

Getting Started with Reloom: From Idea to Sitemap

To begin using Reloom, follow these initial steps:

Access Reloom: Visit the Reloom website through the link provided in the video description.
Select Reloom Starter Plan: Choose the “Reloom Starter Plan” to begin.
Start Free Trial and Apply Coupon: Initiate the 7-day free trial and enter the coupon code “Evolution” to unlock a free month of access, as generously offered to the community.
Create a New Project: Once signed up, create a new project within the Reloom platform to start building your website.

Defining Your Website with a Prompt

The first crucial step in building a website with Reloom is providing a clear and concise prompt that describes your desired website. This prompt acts as the foundation for Reloom’s AI to understand and generate your website structure and content.

Example Prompt:

For this guide, we will build a website for a luxury real estate agent. Consider the following prompt:

“Sarah Martinez is a luxury real estate agent based in Miami, Florida, specializing in high-end residential properties valued at $1 million+. With over $50 million in sales last year and 10 years of experience, she provides White Glove service to both buyers and sellers in Miami’s most prestigious neighborhoods. Pages: Home, About, Services, Listings, and Contact.”

This prompt provides key information:

Industry and Niche: Luxury Real Estate
Target Audience: High-end property buyers and sellers in Miami.
Key Features: Experience, sales record, white-glove service, location.
Required Pages: Home, About, Services, Listings, and Contact.

Generating the Sitemap:

Input Prompt: Enter your detailed prompt into Reloom.
Specify Pages and Language: Select the number of pages (1-5 in this case) and choose “English” as the language.
Generate Sitemap: Click the “Generate Sitemap” button.

Sitemap: A blueprint of a website that outlines its pages, their hierarchy, and the content sections within each page. It serves as a structural guide for website development.

Reloom’s AI analyzes your prompt and automatically creates a suggested sitemap. This sitemap serves as the blueprint for your website, outlining all the pages, their connections, and the sections within each page.

Reviewing and Customizing the Sitemap:

Reloom generates a detailed five-page sitemap based on our prompt, including a structured homepage and individual pages for “About,” “Services,” “Listings” (with a detailed listing page), and “Contact.”

At this stage, you have several options to refine your sitemap:

Adding Pages: Click the ”+” icon to add new pages. For example, you could add a “Blog” page and generate initial content for it.
Adding Sections: Within each page, you can add new sections. For instance, you could add a “Blog Post Body” section to the “Blog” page.
Reordering Sections and Pages: You can easily rearrange sections within a page or reorder entire pages to adjust the website’s flow and structure.
Deleting Sections and Pages: Remove any unnecessary sections or pages to streamline your website.
Global Sections: Identify and manage “Global sections” such as the navigation bar (Navbar) and footer. These sections are consistent across all pages. Reloom automatically identifies Navbars and footers as global. You can visually distinguish them by assigning colors (e.g., orange for Navbar, green for footer).

Navbar (Navigation Bar): A user interface element typically located at the top of a website, containing links to different sections or pages of the site, aiding in navigation.

Footer: The section at the bottom of a webpage, often containing copyright information, contact details, and links to important pages like privacy policy or terms of service.
Creating Custom Global Sections: You can create your own global sections for elements you want to reuse across multiple pages, such as testimonial sections. By creating a global section, any changes made to one instance will automatically propagate across all pages where it is used. This leverages the concept of reusable components.

Reusable Components: Self-contained, modular building blocks of code that can be used multiple times in different parts of an application or website. They promote efficiency and maintainability.

Client Feedback and Sitemap Approval:

A valuable pro tip is to share the sitemap link directly with your client at this stage. This allows for quick feedback and ensures alignment on the website’s structure before proceeding to the wireframe generation phase. Client approval of the sitemap is crucial before moving forward.

Wireframe Generation: Visualizing the Website Structure

Once the sitemap is approved, the next step is to transform it into wireframes. Reloom excels in this process, automatically generating wireframes based on the approved sitemap and the initial prompt.

Select “Wireframe” Mode: Click the “Wireframe” option at the top of the Reloom canvas.
Automatic Wireframe Generation: Reloom’s AI takes over, generating wireframes by selecting relevant components from its extensive library and creating placeholder content based on your prompt.

Wireframe: A basic visual guide representing the skeletal framework of a website or webpage. It outlines the layout, content placement, and functionality without detailed design elements.

Reloom’s Component Library:

All components used in the wireframes are sourced from Reloom’s library of over 1,000 components. You can explore this library from the dashboard’s side navigation (“React Library”). The library offers robust filtering options to help you find specific components:

Category: Filter by categories like “Marketing,” “E-commerce,” or “Application UI.”
Layout Type: Filter by layout characteristics such as “Text Alignment,” “Content Alignment,” or “Number of Columns.”
Elements Included: Filter by elements within components, such as “Text,” “Images,” or “Buttons.”
Interactivity: Filter based on the level of interactivity of the component.

Each component in the library includes:

Viewable Code: Allows you to inspect the underlying code of the component.
Previews: Provides visual previews in both desktop and mobile views, enabling you to see how the component will look on different devices.

Customizing Wireframes:

After the initial wireframe generation, you have various options to customize and refine the design:

Shuffle Components: If you are not satisfied with the components chosen for a particular section, you can select the section and use the “Shuffle components” option. This will regenerate different component types for that section, offering alternative design suggestions.
Replace Component: To select a specific component from the library, choose the section and click “Replace component.” You can then browse the library and choose a component that better suits your needs. The content within the component will still be based on your original prompt.
Section and Element Manipulation: You can move, copy, or delete entire sections or individual elements within a section to fine-tune the layout and content hierarchy.
Component Props Customization: You can customize component properties (props) to create variations. For example, you can adjust the “asset placement” (image or icon placement) within a component to be on the left instead of the right.

Props (Properties): In React, props are inputs to components. They are read-only values passed from parent components to child components to control their rendering and behavior.

Content Refinement with AI:

Reloom provides AI-powered tools to refine the generated content within the wireframes:

Regenerate Copy: Select any text element and click “Regenerate copy” to have the AI rewrite the text, providing fresh content variations.
Edit Section Titles and Descriptions: You can edit section titles and descriptions and then click “Generate copy” to have the AI create new content based on the updated headings.
Adjust Text Length: Use AI to adjust text length directly by selecting text and choosing options like “make shorter,” “make longer,” or “make number of lines.”
Direct Text Editing: You have full control to edit the generated text directly within the wireframe.
Undo Functionality: Use “Ctrl+Z” or “Command+Z” to undo any changes and revert to previous versions.

Experimentation and Design Iteration:

Reloom encourages experimentation at the wireframe stage. Users are encouraged to pause and try out different features, add and delete sections, shuffle components, and select components they prefer. This iterative process allows for design refinement before moving to the code generation phase. In the example provided, the blog page was removed, and image-heavy components were chosen to better suit the luxury real estate agent website aesthetic.

Exporting to React Code and Initial Setup

Once you are satisfied with the wireframe design, the next step is to export it as React code. Reloom generates clean, responsive React components styled with Tailwind CSS.

Prepare React Environment: Ensure you have a React application set up with Tailwind CSS installed. The recommended approach is to use Vite, a fast build tool for modern web development.

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework that provides pre-defined CSS classes to style HTML elements directly in the markup, enabling rapid styling and customization.

Vite: A fast, opinionated web dev build tool that serves your code via native ES modules during development and bundles it with Rollup for production. It’s known for its speed and simplicity.

npm (Node Package Manager): A package manager for JavaScript programming language. It is the default package manager for the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment.
Create Vite React App with Tailwind CSS: If you don’t have a project set up, run the following command in your terminal:
```
npm create vite@latest
```
Follow the prompts to create a React project and choose to include Tailwind CSS during the setup process.
Verify Setup: After installation, start the development server (npm run dev or yarn dev). Open localhost:5173 in your browser. You should see your basic Vite React app with Tailwind CSS styling working correctly.

Exporting from Reloom:

Select React Export Format: In Reloom, select “React” as the export format.
Export Project: Click the “Export” button.
Extract and Add to Project: Download the generated ZIP file, extract its contents, and add the extracted folder to the src directory of your React project. In the example, the folder was renamed to “real-estate-agent” and placed inside src. This folder contains React components representing each page of your website (Home, About, Services, Listings, Contact).

Installing Reloom React Library:

For the exported components to function correctly within your React project, you need to install the Reloom React library.

Follow Export Instructions: When you click “Export” in Reloom, instructions for installing the library are displayed.
Install Dependencies: Run the provided npm install command in your project’s root directory:
```
npm install @reloom-io/reloom-ui @reloom-io/reloom-tailwind
```

Update Tailwind Configuration: Modify your tailwind.config.js file to include Reloom configurations.

Add Content Entry: Open tailwind.config.js and add an entry to the content array to include Reloom components:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: [
    "./src/**/*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}",
    "./node_modules/@reloom-io/reloom-ui/**/*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}", // Add this line
  ],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
  presets: [], // We will add preset below
}

Add Reloom Tailwind Preset: Add the Reloom Tailwind preset using import syntax:

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
import reloomTailwind from '@reloom-io/reloom-tailwind'; // Import

module.exports = {
  content: [
    "./src/**/*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}",
    "./node_modules/@reloom-io/reloom-ui/**/*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}",
  ],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
  presets: [reloomTailwind], // Use as preset
}

Rendering the Homepage:

Import Homepage Component: In your App.tsx (or App.jsx) file, import the Page component from the Home folder within your “real-estate-agent” directory.
```
import Home from './src/real-estate-agent/Home'; // Adjust path if necessary

function App() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Home.Page /> {/* Render the homepage component */}
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;
```
JSX (JavaScript XML): A syntax extension to JavaScript that allows you to write HTML-like structures within JavaScript code. It is commonly used in React to describe user interfaces.
Run Application: Start your React application (npm run dev or yarn dev). Open your browser to localhost:5173. You should now see the homepage of your luxury real estate agent website, including the header, hero section, features, testimonials, call to action, and footer.

Navigating to Other Pages:

To view other pages, simply change the component import in your App.tsx file. For example, to view the “Contact” page:

import Contact from './src/real-estate-agent/Contact'; // Import Contact page

function App() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Contact.Page /> {/* Render the Contact page component */}
    </div>
  );
}

export default App;

By changing the imported component, you can quickly switch between different pages generated by Reloom and verify their initial rendering in your React application.

Completing the Website: Routing, Styling, and Images

Reloom provides an excellent starting point, getting you 80% of the way to a functional website in a short time. The remaining 20% involves customization and refinement, including:

Routing: Implementing navigation between pages within your React application.
Styling: Customizing colors, fonts, and other visual aspects to match your branding.
Images: Adding relevant images to enhance the visual appeal and content of your website.

Implementing Routing with React Router:

To add navigation between pages, React Router is a popular library. In the transcript, Cursor Agent is used to automate the setup of React Router.

Use Cursor Agent (or Manual Setup): Cursor Agent is mentioned as a tool to automate code modifications. In a coding editor like Cursor, you can use its agent feature to install and configure React Router.

Cursor Agent (or AI Coding Assistant): Refers to AI-powered tools integrated into code editors that assist developers with tasks like code generation, refactoring, and automation. In this context, it’s used to simplify React Router setup.
- Open Composer (Command+I in Cursor): Trigger the Cursor Agent interface.
- Tag Code with @folder: Indicate the scope of the code modification to the project folder.
- Prompt for React Router Setup: Write a prompt like: “install and configure react router to set up routes for home about services listings and contact.”
- Execute Prompt: Let Cursor Agent process the prompt. It will automatically install React Router and modify your App.jsx (or App.tsx) file to configure routes for the specified pages. It may also create shared components like a navigation bar.
Manual React Router Setup (Alternative): If you are not using Cursor Agent, you can manually install and configure React Router.
- Install React Router: npm install react-router-dom or yarn add react-router-dom
- Configure Routes in App.tsx: Modify your App.tsx to use BrowserRouter, Routes, and Route components from react-router-dom to define routes for each page component (Home, About, Services, Listings, Contact).
- Create Navigation (Navbar): Manually create a navigation component (or adapt the one potentially generated by Cursor Agent) using Link components from react-router-dom to create links between pages.

Customizing Styling and Adding Images:

Styling: Reloom uses Tailwind CSS for styling. You can customize the website’s appearance by:
- Modifying Tailwind Configuration: Adjust colors, fonts, and other theme settings in your tailwind.config.js file to match your desired branding.
- Custom CSS Classes: Add custom CSS classes or modify existing Tailwind classes within the React components to fine-tune the styling of specific elements.
Images: Enhance your website with images by:
- Sourcing Images: Use platforms like Unsplash for free stock photos or tools like Midjourney to generate custom images.
  
  Unsplash: A website that provides high-quality, royalty-free stock photos.
  
  Midjourney: An independent research lab that produces an artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions, similar to DALL-E.
- Adding Images to Public Folder: Place your images in the public folder of your React project.
- Referencing Images in Components: Reference the images in your React components using relative paths from the public folder in <img> tags or as background images in CSS styles.

Testing and Navigation:

After implementing routing, styling, and images, run your React application. You should now be able to:

Navigate between pages: Use the navigation bar to click through links and move between the Home, About, Services, Listings, and Contact pages.
View Styled Website: See your website with your chosen brand colors and styling applied.
See Images: Verify that images are correctly displayed on the appropriate pages and sections.
Responsive Design Verification: Check that the website remains responsive and displays correctly on different screen sizes (desktop and mobile).

Conclusion: Rapid Website Development and Freelancing Opportunities

Reloom significantly accelerates the process of building React websites. As demonstrated, it’s possible to go from a simple prompt to a functional React website in approximately 15 minutes, achieving 80% completion in a remarkably short time. The remaining 20% for customization, routing, and branding allows for personalization and project-specific adjustments.

This speed and efficiency make Reloom a powerful tool for:

Freelancers: Freelance developers can leverage Reloom to drastically reduce development time, allowing them to take on more projects, offer competitive pricing, and increase their earnings potential on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

Freelancing Platforms (e.g., Upwork, Fiverr): Online marketplaces that connect freelancers with clients seeking various services, including web development, design, and writing.

Upwork & Fiverr: Popular online freelancing platforms where freelancers can offer their services and clients can hire them for projects or tasks.
Rapid Prototyping: Businesses and developers can use Reloom to quickly create prototypes and Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) to validate ideas and gather feedback.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP): A version of a new product or website with just enough features to satisfy early-adopter customers and to provide feedback for future product development.
SaaS and E-commerce Development: Reloom is versatile enough to be used for various types of websites, from SaaS landing pages to complex e-commerce platforms with numerous pages.

SaaS (Software as a Service): A software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet.

E-commerce (Electronic Commerce): The buying and selling of goods or services over the internet.

Landing Page: A standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” after clicking a link in an email, ad, or other digital location.

Call to Action and Further Learning:

To experience the speed and efficiency of Reloom firsthand:

Sign up for Reloom: Visit the Reloom website via the link in the description.
Use Coupon Code “Evolution”: Apply the coupon code “Evolution” to the Reloom Starter Plan to get a free month of access.
Start Building: Turn your next React project into a 15-minute build using Reloom.

By embracing AI-powered tools like Reloom, web developers can significantly enhance their productivity and efficiency, opening up new opportunities in the rapidly evolving landscape of web development.