🔧 I’m Building a Website Builder Tool, and I Created a Simple Placeholder Image Service Along the Way

Right now, I’m working on something exciting: my very own website builder tool. The main goal of this tool is to help non-technical users easily create webpages. Most website builders out there require too much technical knowledge, which can be overwhelming for people who aren’t familiar with coding. My tool, called Pagebee.io, will allow users to create pages by selecting from various pre-designed sections, filling them with their own content, and publishing their websites with just a few clicks.

The Idea

As I’ve been building this tool, I’ve spent a lot of time designing different webpage sections. Many of these designs need one or more images in various sizes. At first, I was manually creating placeholder images for these sections, but it quickly became tedious. That’s when I had an idea: wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that could generate these placeholder images automatically by simply writing a URL with the necessary parameters?

And so, the idea for a simple placeholder image service was born.

How I built it

I sat down and thought about what the URL structure for the API would look like. Once I had a rough idea, I used Cursor with the Cline plugin (formerly known as Claude Dev) to start defining the service. The AI helped me build the basic code for the API, and after several rounds of refinements and optimizations, the API was ready.

The Landing Page

Next, I used the code as a foundation to create a landing page for the service using Cline. On the landing page, I added examples showing how to use the API, along with sample images that were generated by the API itself. You could say that I used the API to create the content for the API’s own landing page (how meta, right?).

And that’s it! My Simple Placeholder Image Service is now live, and I hope you find it as useful as I do. If you’re working on your own designs and need placeholder images, give it a try. It’s been a huge time-saver for me, and I think it could be for you too!