How This Company Creates Instant Websites Now, websites are as easy as drag-and-drop.

When photographer Benjamin Edwards wants to update his website, all he has to do is load a new picture onto his phone; drag it into his web host, The Grid; and voilà, the program loads it onto his home-page and rearranges and recolors the entire site to work with the new image. For his work on behalf of charities such as World Relief that takes him around the globe, the technology is a godsend.

"Since I'm out in the field so often, I don't have a ton of time to work on my website," says Edwards, who is based in Bend, Ore. "I can be in Bolivia, shoot a photo and, if I have cell service, it can be on my website right now."

While building and maintaining a web presence has become easier than ever, it can be a laborious and expensive process. That's where The Grid comes in. The San Francisco startup, currently in beta, provides a URL, hosting services and a dead-simple app -- not a complicated content management system -- on which to build a website. All users do is move text, video and photos into The Grid's program. Once the content is loaded, The Grid's artificial intelligence arranges it into a sleek layout based on best practices for user-interface architecture and SEO. It knows, for instance, if it's building an e-commerce page and will create boxes beneath the images for descriptive copy. Prices are automatically turned into click-through buttons that lead to the checkout page. More impressive, The Grid's AI makes thematic suggestions to improve the overall vibe of the site and its effectiveness, analyzing colors, photographs and text so it understands the subject matter.