ARTICLES & NEWS
Stories, product updates and ideas about building websites with AI, from the team behind Cmini.
All articles
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Blog / CMINI
Want to build your own website? Choose a site type, compare AI builders, templates, custom agencies and WordPress, and learn the five steps of domain, hosting, design, SEO and publishing, with platform costs, pros and cons.
Blog / CMINI
The short answer: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a digital marketing method that improves a website's technical structure, content quality and external trust so its pages rank higher in the "organic results" of search engines like Google, bringing long-term, free and targeted traffic.
Blog / CMINI
From 1 November 2026, Cmini's Chinese name changes from 小C建站 to 小C開店 (小C开店 in Simplified Chinese), which means "Little C opens a shop". The English name Cmini, the address cmini.ai, and your account, websites, plan and points stay the same; there is nothing to set up.
Blog / CMINI
In October 2026 PHP patched two critical vulnerabilities (PHP2Shell) that let attackers take over a server without logging in. A plain-English guide to the impact, which platforms to watch, what to do, and why Cmini sites are not affected.
Blog / CMINI
A Cmini site doesn't need the AI for every change. In the editor, click any text, image or section on the page and a toolbar appears beside it; double-click text to type over it. Changes save automatically and don't go through the AI, so they use no AI points. Bigger changes still go to the AI, and you can mix the two freely.
Blog / CMINI
September 2026 brought a project console that opens before the editor, an assistant on the projects page, clearer build progress and builds that resume where they stopped, rebuilding an existing website (now open to every account), background WordPress imports (since replaced by moving a site straight from its web address), a new name and the launch of cmini.ai.
Blog / CMINI
Cmini's own website, cmini.ai, went live on September 28, 2026, in English and Traditional Chinese, and since October 2026 it has also been available in Simplified Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Indonesian. It explains what Cmini does, compares every plan before you sign up, and publishes practical guides with real, dated prices alongside this blog, all built so that people and AI assistants can find clear answers.
Blog / CMINI
The AI can only build around what you tell it. A good description names your business, says exactly what you offer and to whom, describes the tone and colours you like, and lists the pages you need. After the first version, the best requests are specific, one change at a time, and say what to keep.
Blog / CMINI
A café, a clinic, a yoga studio, a photographer and a consultant each need a different website, because their customers need different facts to decide. For each one, this post covers the pages that fit, the facts to put first, the one action the site should drive, and a ready-to-use description you can give Cmini's AI.
Blog / CMINI
A day-by-day walkthrough of taking a small café from no website to a live site on its own domain with Cmini, covering describing the business, checking the plan, editing by chat and by click, publishing, connecting a domain and posting the first announcement. The café is an illustrative example; every step and feature is real.
Blog / CMINI
Most small business websites need four to six pages, not twenty. The right number is one page for each thing customers need to decide and act, usually a home page, what you offer, who you are, where and when, and how to get in touch, plus a page for each service that deserves its own explanation.
Blog / CMINI
More people now ask an AI assistant where to eat, whom to book or what something costs, and the assistant answers from what it can read on the web. A small business website gets ready by stating its key facts in plain text, answering real customer questions on the page, keeping every detail current, and writing each language properly.
Blog / CMINI
On Cmini, editing and publishing are separate. You edit a working copy; Publish puts it live at a free .cbuilding.app web address, and after that Update sends your latest changes live. Articles appear once the site is published, a custom domain can be added on the Pro plan, the publish history lets you roll back, and you can take the site offline from the editor.
Blog / CMINI
Cmini's assistant lives on your projects page. Ask it how to do something, what your plan includes, how many points you have left or how a build is going. When you ask, it can also create or move a website, publish, take a site offline, roll back and restore versions, and it passes content changes to the website's own AI. It checks with you first before deleting a website or touching domains and DNS.
Blog / CMINI
Besides building with AI, you can start a Cmini website from a ready-made template or from a blank page. Starting from a template uses no AI, so it saves the points an AI build would use, and the site you get is edited exactly like an AI-built one, by clicking on the page or by asking the AI when you want a bigger change.
Blog / CMINI
A simple rule decides who should make a change to your website. If it is easier to say than to do, such as a new section, a new tone or a redesign, ask the AI. If it is easier to do than to say, such as a price, a name or a photo, change it yourself. And whatever the AI writes, you check the facts before you publish.
Blog / CMINI
Cmini counts usage in points: 1 point = US$0.01. AI is charged by usage, at most 50 points a turn, and your website's editing environment uses about 24 points an hour while it runs; hosting and visitor traffic use none. Free gives you 100 points when you sign up; Pro is US$20 a month with 2,000 points every month, and you can top up any time.
Blog / CMINI
A Cmini website doesn't have to depend on one person. Inviting others to edit your website is coming soon: from a project's settings you will invite people and give each a role (admin, editor or viewer), and a shared site shows up in their project list marked "Shared" with their role. Today each website has one owner, who edits it and pays for it; once sharing opens, each collaborator will use their own points.
Blog / CMINI
When visitors send a contact or booking form on a Cmini website, what they submit is collected in your "Form inbox", which you open from your account menu or your project's console. One place for every message across all your websites means nothing gets lost in a separate inbox, and a few simple habits turn those messages into customers.
Blog / CMINI
On the Cmini Pro plan you can serve your website from your own domain, like www.yourshop.com. Publish the site once. The simplest way to connect your domain is to ask the website AI: it checks where the domain's DNS is managed and shows you the right steps. A domain bought through Cmini can have its records set up for you, DNS on Cloudflare can be set up in one click, you can hand the domain's DNS to Cmini by changing its nameservers, or you can add the records shown on the Domains page yourself and verify. Records usually take minutes to a few hours; a nameserver change can take up to 48 hours. You can also search for and buy a new domain right from the Domains page.
Blog / CMINI
With Move my website, you enter the address of a site you own and Cmini's AI rebuilds it as a Cmini website you can edit by chat or by click. It is open to every account, works only for sites you own or have permission to copy, and usually takes a few minutes; a site with hundreds of posts takes longer.
Blog / CMINI
Paste your WordPress address and ask the AI to move it: pages, posts, categories, images and SEO move to Cmini, URLs stay the same, other old ones get 301s. No uploads.
Blog / CMINI
Cmini saves versions of your website as you work, so any edit, by you or by the AI, can be undone by restoring an earlier version. Your live site only changes when you publish, and if a published update goes wrong, you can roll the live site back to the previous release.
Blog / CMINI
Describe your website in Cmini and the AI starts building right away; you can follow each step in the project's chat and ask for changes at any time. If you'd rather see a plan before anything is built, ask the Cmini Assistant in your account: it outlines the title, pages and look in the chat, adjusts them with you, and builds when you say go.
Blog / CMINI
cmini.ai went live on September 28, 2026 with no history, no links and no traffic. Here is everything we did on day one so that search engines and AI assistants can read it, understand it and quote it, from static pages and structured data to llms.txt, IndexNow and articles written around facts.
Blog / CMINI
Cmini started with a block editor, where you assembled pages from ready-made modules. In August 2026 we moved to editing directly on the rendered page, because it lets you and the AI work on the same website, exactly as your customers will see it.
Blog / CMINI
Small business websites rarely break; they just drift out of date, one unchanged price or opening hour at a time, because every small edit costs a call, a fee or a login nobody remembers. The fix is to make each change cheap enough that the owner makes it the same day, and to check the few facts that matter once a month.
Blog / CMINI
Every article on cmini.ai is written, stored and published in the same Articles system that comes with every Cmini website, not in a separate blogging tool. Here is how it works, and the habits we use to write articles that search engines and AI assistants can quote.
Blog / CMINI
Getting AI to build a website is the easy part; a small business changes its site for years afterwards. We built Cmini so you can keep editing the same site two ways — tell the AI what to change, or click anything on the page and change it yourself — without ever touching code.
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