How To Use Midjourney: Creating AI Images For Your Website

Sometimes, taking your online presence to the next level is as simple as upgrading the graphics you use to illustrate your social and blog posts and tell your brand story throughout your website.
But for busy business-focused website owners and managers, the problem is that it can be a lot easier said than done.
But with the power of AI tools such as Midjourney — which we’re going to introduce you to today — you can use the time and creativity you have to revolutionize your website’s professionalism and overall vibe.
Even if you’ve never even heard of Midjourney before, there’s no need to worry. We’re going to start by introducing you to what the platform is, then walk through each step to using it to produce high-quality graphics, and finally end with several tricks for optimizing your use to get even more value without lost efficiency.

Table of Contents

What Is Midjourney?
How To Use Midjourney To Generate Website Images
Advanced Midjourney Image Prompts
5 Tips For Using Midjourney Like A Pro
More Resources To Enhance Your Understanding
Using The Images On Your Website
Keep Improving Your Website With DreamHost’s Help


What Is Midjourney?
Just like we promised, let’s start with the basics.
Midjourney is a powerful platform that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), namely machine diffusion and large language models, to enable everyday people to generate tons of creative imagery quickly without the need for coding knowledge or graphic design skills.
Midjourney falls into the generative AI tools category, a subset of machine learning. Generate AI tooling is all about enabling users to create new content (images, text, and even music and video) based on prompts. The coolest part is how it learns from these prompts and other data to refine future models and create even more accurate outputs over time.
With Midjourney AI, you can create custom graphics in any style you can imagine for blogs, product pages, website imagery, social media posts, advertisements, and more. If you’re familiar with DALL-E from OpenAI (which is also behind ChatGPT), which launched in early 2021, Midjourney is a similar prompt-based image generator.
What’s interesting about Midjourney is it does have a somewhat distinctly whimsical and detailed design style that often shines through in the graphics it produces. You can check it out here .
Founded by David Holz, former co-founder of computer hardware and software firm Leap Motion, Midjourney opened their beta version to the public for the first time in July of 2022. While its look and functionality continue to evolve — as all good tech should — we’ll do our best to show you how to use it in its current state.
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How To Use Midjourney To Generate Website Images
There’s a bit of set up involved, but once you get to the image-creation part, using Midjourney is pretty quick.
We’d recommend you set aside 30 minutes to an hour of your day to get your first Midjourney graphic created if you’re starting with us at step one.
1. Create And/Or Log Into Your Discord Account
Midjourney functions as a Discord bot, which means you have to be using the Discord app or website in order to take advantage of it. Discord is basically a social platform where you can communicate via text, voice and video calls, and more in different communities called servers.
If you don’t already have a Discord account, head over to their website and begin the process of setting one up via web browser, mobile app, or desktop app. Once your account is created, you’ll follow a few more steps to claim and verify it. Discord actually has a super helpful guide we recommend following, here .
If you’re not used to digital chat apps, Discord can look a little chaotic at first, but it’s really easy to get familiar with — and the reward of getting access to Midjourney will be worth it.

2. Join The Midjourney Server On Discord
Once you’re logged in to Discord, you have to add the Midjourney server to your profile.
Locate the list of servers on the left side of your screen under the Discord icon. You may not have any yet if you’re a new user. Use the “ + ” icon to add a server.

You should see a “Join a Server” popup inviting you to paste in the link to your desired server. Here’s the invite link for Midjourney: http://discord.gg/midjourney
Pop that in and hit “ Join Server .”

3. Visit A #General Or #Newbie Channel
You should now be inside the Midjourney Discord server.
Take a glance over at the side bar on the left. The sidebar will change as the administrators of the server update it, but at the top you may see some informational links, such as settings and events. Everything else is a channel that people can use to communicate. Channels are often organized into groups such as “support,” “chat,” etc.
What you want to look for are channels with titles like “general,” “newbie,” or “newcomer.” These channels are designed for beginners to start playing around with the Midjourney Bot. Feel free to explore, but keep in mind the Midjourney Bot will not generate images in all channels.
4. It’s Time To Create Your First Graphic!
Once you’re in your channel of choice, it’s time to get creative.
You can use the Midjourney Bot in different ways via commands . There are lots of commands that do different things, but the one we’re interested in right now is /imagine.
/imagine creates a unique graphic from a description called a prompt.
A prompt is a text-based statement that the Midjourney Bot analyzes to create an image. It basically dissects a prompt into smaller units, known as tokens, which it then compares to its training data to generate an image that lines up. Knowing this, it’s easy to see why carefully crafting this prompt is so important.
Later, we’ll dive into tips and tricks for optimizing prompts. But for now, let’s talk about just getting one entered into the prompt field:

Type “/imagine prompt:” into the message line at the bottom of your screen in Discord. You can also just type “/” into the box and select the imagine command from the list that pops up.
Type your prompt in the box that appears
Hit enter to send your message and the Midjourney Bot will begin working to display several versions of your request. This can be ultra-fast or slower based on how many people are using the bot at the time (there are a lot of complexities to the speed of image generation, but this is what it mostly boils down to).


For first-time users, before the bot will produce any graphics, it’ll send you a message to accept the Terms of Service. Once you do, you’ll get a welcome message with some membership information as well as a brief set of instructions on using the Midjourney Bot.
At the time of this writing, new Midjourney Bot users get 25 free queries before needing to upgrade to a paid plan. Keep in mind, the scope and the availability of the free program changes.
To subscribe to a paid plan, visit midjourney.com/account , sign in with your Discord account, and choose your subscription plan. Right now, a basic plan starts at $8/month when billed annually.
If you happen to try out Midjourney at a time when a free trial isn’t available and are interested in dipping your toes into the water before shelling out any cash, there are plenty of options on our robust list of free AI tools .
5. Embark Upon The Image Refinement Process
With all that admin out of the way and your first prompt processed, you should see an image grid with four options in front of you.
(Note: Since you’re sharing this Discord channel with lots of other users doing the same thing you are, their graphics may load before yours, and you may lose the results of your prompt in the flow. An easy way to track down your graphics is to find your mentions. On the mobile app, hit the three-line menu at the top left, then the bell icon to find your mentions. On desktop, mentions are under the inbox tray icon at the top right. Here’s a helpful guide .)

The buttons along the bottom are there to help you refine this output and get exactly the graphic you’re looking for:
U1 U2 U3 U4
In previous iterations of Midjourney, these buttons were to upscale images (enlarging them without losing image quality). However, now they’re for isolating your favorite image from the grid for further iterating.