Can you guess what I think of corporate websites from this photo? Image by Mister Wind-Up Bird

A friend of mine, James Chartrand of Men with Pens, asked me a few days ago, “Why is your site/hosting different from everyone else’s beyond the “we care” mentality?”

He asked this in reply to me mentioning how I wanted eVentureBiz to be different. I wanted it to play by different rules than all the other hosting companies out there.

I sat back in my leather-cushioned chair, twirled my pen in hand, and thought for a moment about his question. It was harder to answer than I thought.

As I always do to gain some insight, I thought in reverse. How are we the same as everyone else? We offer 3 hosting plans, which is typical. We include free scripts, just as many companies do. We do daily backups of websites, have tech support, etc.

Then I took myself back to when I wrote our business plan. During the examining of my competition part of the plan, I remember being frustrated by pretty much all of my competition. Some of those frustrations were:

• Their websites all basically looked the same.
• Their “Marketing” links were a joke.
• I felt like their websites were one big ad with strange people staring at me.
• I found no real value in their websites. They’d sell you on hosting and tell you “Good luck, we’re here if you encounter any technical problems with your web hosting account.”

The problem was they were all corporate.

To use James’ words, “Corporate websites are boring.” It’s like they were all spit out of a processing plant that created useless and boring websites.

Yes, that’s a key part to how we are different. I tried to make eVentureBiz, not boring. But that still wasn’t my answer; part of it, yes – but something was still missing. Then it finally hit me like a snowball to the face first thing in the morning.

I pushed off from my desk making my chair roll back two feet while I viciously pointed at my computer screen and said, “There! That’s how I’m different. That’s what it is. That’s my brand!”

What was I pointing at, you ask?

It was an interview I read over at Retire @ 21. Michael interviewed probably the most knowledgeable search engine optimization guy that has ever lived, Aaron Wall.

When asked what the best advice Aaron has ever been given, his response was:

I think the best brands, the best sites have a large portion of their founders personality in them. Never be afraid to be yourself, after all there are 1/2 billion people on the www, not all of them have to agree with you. Concentrate on the ones that share your views, concentrate on making their experience the very best it can be, the rest forget them.

eVentureBiz is an extension of, me.

That’s how we’re different. In a way, that’s our brand. Our website has life. It grows; it learns, it’s fun; and it’s business. It’s not corporate. It’s Web 2.0.

From day one my target customers were business owners and entrepreneurs (though we don’t forget the rest as Aaron mentions). We provide them with the tools they need to succeed online and then encourage them to stick around and grow with us as people, entrepreneurs, and business owners.

I’m not saying no other web hosting and development companies out there have a Web 2.0 aspect to them. Many have forums and blogs, but none live and grow as eVentureBiz does. Heck, Yahoo! is probably the biggest social media web host there is.

But Yahoo! is something for everybody. And something for everybody is something for nobody.

So which is it? If you own a business, you’ll have to decide. Do you go corporate or social? Why?