Creativity powers the world.
It fuels the dream of your business
What Should Your Website Do For You?
A website is your online real estate. It's your house, your asset. And it can only be a liability if it's looks bad and has a poor experience for the visitor. So you need a top tier website - one that looks good and performs well. But what does a bad ass website do for you really?
- It puts you on the map (literally and figuratively)
- It acts as a sales funnel for your business
- It gets eyes on your art, projects, or hobbies
Those are a given. So here are a few more things a head-turning website does for you that most people don't consider:
- It builds credibility and reinforces your brand identity, making you the go-to expert in your field. It becomes the magnet. It attracts.
- A website serves as a dynamic portfolio, showcasing your work and accomplishments in an engaging way.
- It opens up new channels for customer engagement, encouraging interaction and feedback. That's new territory, new frontiers, more gold rushes.
- It acts as a powerful tool for analytics, helping you understand your audience. If you have it set up the right away, it can decipher the secret code of what your visitors really want. (Hint: heat maps)
- A dope website creates opportunities. Have you ever heard the saying: you make your own luck? A website does that for you. It creates more luck. If done right, it's an infinite luck glitch. Let Excitify help you create that!
- It becomes a hub for serendipitous encounters, connecting you with collaborators and kindred spirits who elevate your vision.
Why A Mediocre Website Hurts More Than Your Business and Brand
With the rise of so many no or low code drag and drop website builders, the internet has become flooded with carbon copies and reiterations of the same thing.
Sameness and familiarity are good to an extent. But humans crave novelty and interesting experiences. What creates interest in people? It's a circumventing of expectation. You challenge some notion previously held and change it in a small way.
The equation comes out to this:
Same thing = boring
Recognizable thing that also challenges expectations = interesting
This tenet holds true for the majority of websites. Many businesses have so many startup costs that when it comes to their website (their digital real estate - their billboard to the world) they pull punches. They slap a Squarespace or Wix website together and just get on with it.
But they're leaving gains on the table. Or worse, they're sacrificing more customers at the expense of just getting things going. Without top tier design stacked on top and working synergistically (or symbolically if you're tired of corporate LinkedIn speech) of their drag and drop site, they appear to the general public as just another Store.
People tend to stay on bad websites less than ten seconds.
The public knows when they are among the boring or the crap. It's intuitive. Aesthetically hardwired.
People can't always express why they don't like websites. Intrigue, aesthetics, and desire are a lot of the times subconscious.
But it's 2025, I hear you say. AI can create a dope website for me or my brand so fast and easy and cheap.
That is true. But what LLM's are doing are algorithmic trend-riders. They compute based on what's been trained in their models to interpret. Usually the next common factor of whatever it is you're asking good ol' GPT to do.
New and novel, pure inspiration layered on top of the what exists, is still out of reach. For the time being...
So even if you build a website with AI or one of those no code builders, it really doesn't hurt to have a second pair of eyes from a developer and designer to boost those same = boring parts and get more $ for you and your business. Reach out for a free second pair of eyes today.
How To Outshine Your Competitors
A million dollar question. Maybe even a billion dollars. But what about if you're not running a massive company with unlimited war chests to spend on marketing and advertising?
What do you do?
Get creative.
But what's does that mean. It means...
- 👉Take stock of what you already have: Your strengths and weaknesses are key to find areas of support and leverage
- 👉Run a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
- 👉Then, and here comes the crucial part, think outside the box with your findings. Most people can't or won't do this
- 👉The creative energy is the cheat code. Plug it in
- 👉Test, iterate (A/B test), and run the winning strategies
Ok. Great. What's the creative energy? It's inspiration in its pure, undiluted form.
Elan vital
Vis viva
The divine spark
Taking your findings and seeing the untapped potential:
That means going where your competitors are not (yet). Doing what they're not.
This gives you the edge AND the hedge. You want to set up the win in either scenario. But going too far out risks being in the future and no one seeing the value now.
Let's run an example. You have a local Italian restaurant and your margins are razor thin. Like thin enough to slice garlic julienne. You take a look at your competitors and they have similar storefronts, just as clean and well managed. You even have similar menus (although you'll go to the grave saying your's is the best of the area), and customers frequent all your establishments. They have decent sites, although they all look the same. The same green, red, and white color scheme. Familiar but cookie cutter (pizza cutter?)
What do you have?
On close inspection, not much that differentiates. But looking closer, you notice something. You notice that you're open 30 minutes later than all your competition.
30 minutes, so what?
This is fertile ground to plant. This 30 minutes lets you say:“You're open longer. You cater to the hungry well into the night. You're there for them when they get that late night craving. You understand them.”
What's more, this allows you to differentiate your website. You can keep the Italian colors - that palette that customers associate with Italian food. But now you can add a toggle for dark mode below the ad copy of: Late Night Craving? Enable dark mode.
This flips your website into a dark mode (a good User Experience feature to have anyway) and allows you to differentiate from your competitors who run simple rinky dink sites.
Of course, your pizza should be 🔥🔥🔥. But that goes without saying.
And that's just one example. Others could be:
- Better order flow. That means less steps between the menu and paying for food
- Taking exact colors (the hex codes) from your restaurant's signs, logo, exterior or interior and using them on the site for a pleasing cohesion
- 2025 SEO upgrades for local search
- If you're close but not exactly within a university area, run a student discount, and if turns out you have a lot of students, add a Got the Munchies deal box offer they can't refuse, and then feature that promo in the site
- Etc. There are so many opportunities to find the edge and use the hedge. It just needs creative spark
The goal is to take a leap of faith. Go where others have not, but if you fall, you fall in a fun ball pit.
Remember, anything can be switched with just a few lines of code. ✌️
What Your Website and a Himalayan Sherpa Have In Common
What is a Sherpa but the people that live in the shadow of the great mountain, Sagarmāthā as the Nepalese call it... Everest. They are often the wise guide that leads you to the highest point, to the snow-capped zenith, all 29K feet. The dizziest spot on earth, the summit, the ceiling, Atlas holding up the sky. Sherpas have now come to be known in modern English as any mountaineering guide or climbing partner that you can hire for your trek.
But what does a Sherpa have to do with your website? Think of it like this: getting people interested in things, much less getting them to buy what they're interested in, is a great task. It's like a climb to the summit and at the summit is the sale. A prospective customer starts with a general interest in what you're offering, i.e. they have a desire and are searching for a guide to take them from the bottom of the mountain to the top, where fulfillment awaits. It's your job to get them there.
The Mountain means something to each of you. For you, it is the overcoming of their hesitancies and fears and getting to the top where the sale is. And for them it is also something to overcome - something on their todo list, the problem or desire that is finally achieved.
Your website is your Sherpa when you physically can't be there for them. It should be a guide for them all the way through the sales process.
- Outlining their desire
- How you can help with your product or expertise
- Guiding them with useful information
- Having the website be visually intuitive—that means: I see the peak, the end goal, and you saying “this is how we get there.”
And this even applies to restaurant websites. The famished patron is searching the web, looking to get to the peak of deliciousness and your site can guide them with its easy-to-find menu, eye-watering pictures, etc.
Be the Sherpa for your prospective customers. Let your website be their guide.