Why are websites so boring?

There was a stretch of the internet where every page looked like the person who made it. Custom, strange, a little broken, unmistakably theirs. Nobody was good at it, and that was sort of the point. You could tell who you were dealing with before you read a word.

Then building a website got easy, which is a good thing, and the way it got easy was templates. One layout that has to work for a dentist, a gym, and a bakery. It can’t be shaped like any of them, so it gets shaped like nothing: a big photo, a headline, three icons, a row of testimonials, a contact form.

Multiply that by a decade and you get the internet we have now, where you can visit four businesses in the same town and see the same website four times in different colors. Say what you like about MySpace, and there’s plenty to say, but you could tell whose page you were standing on.

Here’s the part that matters for a small business. People decide how they feel about you in the first couple of seconds, long before they read your services list. That decision is the whole job of the website.

A template site spends those seconds saying “this is a business.” Not yours. Just a business. Everything that makes somebody pick you over the identical listing under you on Google, the personality, the care, the weird specific thing you do that nobody else does, is exactly what the template had to strip out to be reusable.

You’re not competing on features. You’re competing on whether somebody feels like they’ve met you.

The first real question I ask anybody isn’t how many pages they need. It’s what they want somebody to feel when they land on it. That question builds more website than a sitemap ever does, and most people have never been asked.

One of my clients couldn’t tell me what was wrong with her first site. No notes, nothing to mark up, she just knew it wasn’t her. So I asked what she wanted it to feel like, and she gave me eight words. Dark cottagecore. Moody. Witchy. Earthy. Whimsical. Botanical. Overgrown garden. Mysterious but cozy. Every one of those words turned into something you can point at on her live site. The rebuild came out of that list, not a revision cycle.

That’s what a creative website is. Not decoration bolted onto a template. A structure that could only have been built for one business, because it started from something only that business could have said.

A creative site isn’t an excuse for a site nobody can use. If somebody can’t find your phone number, the design failed, however clever it was. Every choice still has to serve the person landing on the page.

So the animation sits on top of a page that works perfectly without it. The content is real HTML that search engines and AI answer engines read straight from the source. Everything is tested on a phone first. It holds 60 frames a second, and it stops entirely for anyone whose device asks for reduced motion.

You can have both. Most sites don’t, because doing both is more work, not because it’s a trade-off.