012: The Website Platform That Finally Made My Brand Feel Like Me

Hey friends, welcome back to the Flourish Foundry Podcast! 🥂

Staring at your screen, stuck between Wix, Showit, and a dozen other options, wondering where your business's website should live? You’re in the right place. Choosing your website’s home is one of the biggest decisions you'll make for your brand, and the wrong choice can lead to months of frustration and a site that never quite feels like you.

After seeing a new client struggle with this exact problem, I knew we needed to talk about it. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on two of the most popular platforms out there—the all-in-one builder, Wix, and the creative-favorite, Showit—to give you the clarity you need to move forward with confidence.

In this episode, we break down:

• Design Flexibility: The real difference between Wix’s templates and Showit’s "move-anything-anywhere" creative freedom.
• Ease of Use vs. Empowerment: Why a steeper learning curve can sometimes lead to a much better result for your brand.
• The Blogger's Dilemma: Unpacking the surprising power of the Showit + WordPress integration for SEO and creating beautiful blog content.
• E-commerce Capabilities: When Wix might actually be the better fit and how to sell products beautifully on Showit.
• The Final Verdict: How to know which platform truly aligns with your specific goals as a high-achieving, creative business owner.

This conversation goes beyond a simple pros-and-cons list. We’re talking about what it means to build a digital home that doesn’t just work, but feels like a true extension of your brand’s heart and soul. 🤍

If you’re a creative entrepreneur, a service provider, or a visionary who’s tired of feeling boxed in by templates and ready to build a website that helps you flourish, this episode was made for you.

Explore the Resources Mentioned:

• Shop our Showit Website Templates in the Corner Store
• Learn about our Template Customization Services

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Music: "Great podcast intro (both short and long version included)" by Lundstroem. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hi friends and welcome back to the Flourish Foundry Podcast. I'm your host, Abby Johansson, now as of May 15th. And well, let's be honest, Facebook official, I haven't legally changed my name. Um, but welcome back to the podcast where we talk about all things branding, web design, and building your business that actually feels like you. Usually we have some guests on the show, interviews here and there. Today it's just me over the summer. There's a few things that I want to chit-chat about. So let's get into it. Today I want to talk about building your site on Show It versus Wix. Now, for those of you who don't know, I typically build my clients' websites on Show It because of its creative freedom. And we'll get into that a little bit more later. But if you're looking to DIY your website and you're hesitant on which platform to pick, this is gonna be a really good episode for you. And even if you're looking to hire a designer, this might be helpful just to go into it knowing what platform would work best for you. Choosing the right website platform can feel a little overwhelming. There's a lot of options out there now, but having the right foundation can save you months of headache and back and forth, which is exactly what happened to my current client, unfortunately, which is the inspiration for today's episode. So I don't know all of the details, but I do know that she has been back and forth with her developer slash designer, I'm not entirely sure which is which, for months now, and has been DMing me back and forth about it. And all she has to show for it now is a Wix website built by her fiance, which she could have gotten for free, most likely. So let's break it down together. Wix versus show it. Wix is an all-in-one website builder, it does have drag and drop ability, but it's limited. Uh, there are templates built in and then a lot of options for plugins. It seems like simple on the surface, but then it can do quite a bit, actually. I was surprised. This is my first time working in Wix, and I was surprised at how much it was able to do. Show it, on the other hand, is known for its ability to produce uh extremely unique yet functional conversional websites. You'll see it mostly used by photographers, service-based businesses, creatives. That's kind of the people that are drawn to that because of its again, creative freedom. So it truly is drag and drop. You can put anything anywhere, which can produce a really ugly website if you don't know what you're doing, or if you don't know basic design rules or web design rules. Like I said, I primarily work with show it for my clients, and by primarily, I mean always, um, because of the creative freedom and the ability to add in code as needed in a very simple, straightforward way that often really makes the website come to life and provides movement and makes it look more, it's more engaging instead of just a pretty designed PDF. The design flexibility between the two, like I said, Wix has a good amount of flexibility, more than I was expecting, but it's definitely not as flexible as Show It is. Show it, it's similar to Adobe products or the Adobe Suite, rather. If you're familiar with Adobe, it'll kind of come almost natural to you. Now let's talk about the ease of use and the kind of the learning curve with each platform. If we're honest, no platform is gonna be completely intuitive to anyone. There's always gonna be a few YouTube tutorials here and there that are required. But I think this is one thing with web design that makes it a very limiting medium for creatives because your imagination is capped by your ability to use a platform or a software. And the same is true for graphic design. So with branding, it's very similar. I mean, you can have all of these ideas for what you want your brand to look and feel like, but if you're not able to execute that in Adobe, or I don't even know another example of a that's the industry standard, is the Adobe suite. So Illustrator InDesign, Photoshop. If you're not able to use that, then your ideas very quickly dissipate. I think this is often where people get frustrated building their own website or their own brand, is because they know how they want it to look as like a figurative thing in the back of their head, but then actually getting that to translate digitally or physically is a whole other game. And that's where it becomes really helpful to hire a designer to help you bring that vision to life. So anyway, Ace of Views, Wix is advertised as being extremely user-friendly, hence why I hadn't used it before. Because I was like, I'm a web designer, I'm too good for Wix. If I'm completely honest with you, that was my view on Wix because it's very I get ads for it all the time, and I'm like, yeah, that is not for me. But there is definitely a need for it for people to produce a website on their own. You can kind of plug and play, there's a lot of templates already on there, yeah. And I I would say it's pretty beginner-friendly, but I don't know. It's my take on that, probably it's a little skewed. Show it definitely has a learning curve up front, 1000%, and that's why it's also advertised as being a good platform for a DIY website. I don't agree with that take necessarily. Um, there's a lot of template options out there. I have my own template shop of Show It websites, but the difference is all of my templates give you access to a course that teaches you exactly how to use Show It. And I think it's kind of a disservice if you don't have that. So while that's a bit of a time investment, it's a much more affordable option than paying a designer to do your website. So show it 1000% deep learning curve on that one. Now let's talk a little bit about blogging and SEO, which I'm almost scared to even say the word right now because with the infiltration of AI generated content, SEO has changed quite a bit. And I am certainly no SEO expert, but I do know that Wix has its own blogging platform built in. So you can customize it slightly, but not a ton. And then Show It uses WordPress for its blogging, which back in my day was really good for SEO credibility. WordPress websites typically rank higher, they have a lot of domain authority. So with Show It, you can design how your blog looks on the just show it design platform. But then when your blog is actually published, it's published through WordPress. And WordPress is known for its SEO capabilities with Yoast SEO and all the things, yada yada. E-commerce, okay. This is where my interest in Wix began to peak because this is Shoit's downfall is e-commerce. And like I said earlier, Showa is mostly known for photographers, creative, service-based businesses. I one, well, I'll get into my take in just a second. If your main goal is selling a lot of products, Wix might be for you. Let's go back to the beginning here. Because if you remember, at the start of this episode, we started talking about my current client who has her website built on Wix by her fiance. So where he started to get tripped up is the checkout experience. And I was super grateful for this opportunity to come in and dig around a little bit and figure it out for them. I love that kind of stuff. With my experience and credentials, part of what I do is wireframing and creating a map of how everything connects to each other within your website. And this is something that a DIY website definitely doesn't have. Most of the time, if you're DIYing, you're just gonna start on the home page and keep going from there. But all of the websites that I built start with a wireframe. So telling you exactly what is gonna be on each page, where each section is going to link to. That way we're super clear on how people navigate your website. I didn't have to do wireframes for the entire website, just for the checkout experience. And their products are unique. There's a lot of customization options, so a lot of variants on each product. It's not just like, oh, we have 10 products for sale. There's like 84 variants on each product. So it was super important that it made sense that the wireframes were very clear and communicated a very clear direction that the customers should go on to place their order. And this is where I became very impressed with Wix. To do what I had to do to make their website functional and super easy to use for the customer, took me about a day and a half in Wix. It would have taken me probably two weeks in Show It, if I'm completely honest with you. Show it, you customize everything so much that for e-commerce it's a little bit impractical. Like I said earlier, I do have a template shop, and my templates are sold through my Show It website, but that is through having to connect with Shopify to handle the e-commerce section of that. So you kind of have this like third-party situation going on. So here's my take on the two platforms, Wix versus Show It. If you want something fast and basic and all in one, especially if you're looking to sell multiple products, I honestly would recommend Wix. I think you can follow the design rules a lot easier because it does it for you in a lot of ways. And you can always hire someone on later to juzge it up a little bit and make it fancy. But if you are someone with a highly specific vision for how you want your website to feel, I would recommend show it. Especially if you have the budget to hire on a designer because it's super easy for you to make edits later. That ease of use conversation we had earlier, that's really just for starting from scratch because your show it website is going to start from scratch unless you buy a template. For going in and making simple edits later in a way, I think show it is actually simpler because everything is just on one screen in a way. Wix operates more similarly to WordPress, in my opinion, where you might have to go into the products tab and edit this detail on the product screen or the design platform of Wix, or it might be in the settings, or it might be like you kind of have to poke around and find what you're looking for, which can be a little frustrating and lead to duplicate info or wrong info somewhere on your website. If you're feeling overwhelmed trying to figure out your website direction, how people get from one page to the next, or you're deep in the DIY spiral, I've got you. Don't worry. You can explore my show at templates because that gives you a really easy, that's a really easy entry point into having a beautiful website. It's the lowest buy-in option that I have. And then I also offer template customization, which I think is the sweet spot because you get a mini branding package. So you get your own logo, color palette, font, pack, the whole nine, and you get your website customized for you. So then literally all you'd have to do down the road is make sample changes later. And you also get access to my copywriting guide that tells you exactly how to present your services, talk about yourself, infuse keywords, all of that good stuff. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope this episode gave you clarity and confidence to pick the right website platform for your business, whether you decide to do it yourself or hire a designer. I hope this leads you in the right direction, whether that be Wix or Showa or another platform completely. If anything in this episode stood out to you, you have any questions, comments, please just hit reply, comment, whatever. Any way that you can get a hold of me, and I'll get back to you. Not ready to say goodbye? Me neither. Follow along on Instagram at flourish.foundry to stay connected day to day or join my email list for freebies, new episode updates, fun links, and more.