Sign up for most website builders and you're in for a round of questions first. What's your business called. What industry are you in. What's your elevator pitch. Answer all of it, wait for a spinner, and you get a site back that still needs a full rewrite.
Cantrip skips most of that. Signing up asks for two things: a name, and a look. Type the name, add a logo if you've got one, pick a brand color, pick a theme. The theme picker shows a real preview, not a screenshot, so the colors and your logo are already sitting in it before you commit to anything. Hit create, and the site's built in seconds.
What you land in isn't empty. Three pages are already there and already linked together in the nav: Home, About, and Contact.
- Home has a banner with your business name on it and a photo that matches the theme's mood (the moodier dark themes get moodier photos, not a generic office stock shot), a content block, and a "What We Do" grid ready for your services.
- About has a content block and an image, waiting for your actual story.
- Contact has an intro block and a working Name, Email, and Message form.
Here's the part worth being upfront about: none of that text is written about your business. It's placeholder copy, there to hold the shape of the page until you swap it for your own words. That's on purpose. Builders that promise an AI will write your whole site for you still hand back something generic underneath, sentences that could describe any business in your category, dressed up with a couple of your keywords. You still end up rewriting most of it. Cantrip doesn't pretend to skip that step. It hands you a real, structured page and gets out of the way so you can fill it in yourself, in your own words, starting from something instead of nothing.
And if you picked the wrong look on your way in, that's not a redo. Themes swap in one click, any time, without touching the content you've already written.