A homepage is a conversation, not a brochure

Most homepages open by talking about themselves. The visitor arrived with a question, and the page answers a different one.

What a visitor is silently asking

Someone lands on a cabinet shop's homepage from a search. They have an unspoken list: Is this for people like me? Do they do the thing I need? Do they work where I live? Can I trust them? What do I do next? If the page answers those in that order, the visitor keeps going. If it opens with a slogan and a stock photo, the visitor is still holding the questions and now has to go looking.

A brochure lists what the company wants to say. A conversation answers what the other person wants to know. The homepages we write are the second kind.

The five things on the first screen

Before the visitor scrolls, the first screen on a phone says, in a sentence or two each:

1. Who it is for. Homeowners building on the water. Families planning retirement. Property managers with a dozen buildings. Naming the reader is the fastest way to make them stay.
2. What you do. In plain words. Custom homes. Cabinets built and installed. Interior and exterior painting. Not solutions, not experiences.
3. Where. The towns or the county. A business in Delray Beach that serves all of Palm Beach County says so on the first screen, because the visitor is checking.
4. Proof. One real thing. A photo of a finished job, how long the company has been in business, a line from a review. One, not a wall.
5. One action. Call, text, request an estimate, book a call. One button, visually louder than anything else.

Everything else on the homepage comes after that screen, in roughly the order a buyer would ask about it: the services, a few projects, how the process works, the questions people ask, the team.

How we test a headline

The headline is the one line most visitors read, so we do not settle it in a meeting. We write a few versions and run them against real visitors for a while, measuring whether more people scroll, tap the button, or open the assistant. A headline that describes the work in the customer's words usually beats one that describes the company in its own words. "Custom homes built on your lot in Delray Beach" tends to do more than "Building dreams since the beginning", and we would rather know than guess.

We also read the headline out loud to the owner. If it sounds like something they would say to a stranger at a counter, it is close. If it sounds like a billboard, it is not.

What gets cut

Most homepage rewrites are more deletion than writing. The things that usually go:

• The welcome sentence. Nobody needs to be welcomed to a website.
• The mission statement, which belongs on the About page if anywhere.
• The slider of rotating images, of which most visitors see one.
• The paragraph about passion and commitment, which every competitor also has.
• The row of partner logos above the fold.
• Any second call to action that competes with the first.

The assistant has to match the page

On the sites we build, a named assistant sits on the page, and its first line is part of the same conversation. If the headline says custom homes on your lot and the assistant opens with "How can I help you today?", the conversation restarts. So the opener is written for the page. On the homepage of the builder's site, the assistant asks whether the visitor already owns a lot. On a service page it asks about that service. On the careers page it asks if they want to apply. Same voice as the page, picking up where the page left off.

That is the whole idea. The homepage says the first few things a good salesperson would say, in the order they would say them, and then hands off to a person or an assistant who continues rather than starts over.

It is how we write the front door of every site we build, and how we write the opening lines of the assistants that stand in it.

Questions people ask