writing a homepage.
a visitor arrives with one question: is this for me. answer it above the fold or lose them.
say what you do, for whom, and what happens next. in plain language, in the first screen, before any brand narrative.
the most common homepage failure is describing the company rather than addressing the visitor. a headline about vision, a paragraph about values, a carousel of abstractions — and a reader who still cannot tell what the business sells or whether it is relevant to them.
a homepage has three jobs, in order: confirm the visitor is in the right place, make one thing obvious to do, and answer the questions that stop people acting.
everything else — the brand story, the values, the team photographs — is legitimate content that belongs further down the page or on another page entirely. it is not what the first screen is for.
— 01the first screen decides everything.
within a few seconds a visitor should know what you do, who it is for, and where it applies. "social media management for gulf hospitality brands" does that. "we craft meaningful digital experiences" does not.
so write the headline as a plain statement of the offer, not a slogan. the sub-line adds the qualifier — who it is for, where you operate, what makes it different in concrete terms. specificity is what makes a visitor recognise themselves. narrowing costs you visitors who were never going to buy and wins the ones who were.
and put one action in that first screen. one, phrased as what the visitor gets rather than what you want: "see pricing", "book a call", "get the guide". two competing buttons split the decision and reduce both. a secondary link is fine if it is visibly secondary — one primary action, styled as such, and everything else quieter.
resist the carousel. rotating messages mean the business could not decide which one mattered, and visitors read the first slide at most. pick the strongest message and commit the space to it. if genuinely different audiences need different messages, that is an argument for separate pages rather than a rotating compromise.
— 02answer the questions that block action.
the middle of the page exists to remove doubt: what exactly is included, what it costs or the range, who else uses you, how it works, and how long it takes. those are the questions that hold up a decision.
price is the one most businesses omit and most visitors want. a range, a starting point, or an explanation of what drives cost is enough — silence on price reads as either expensive or evasive, and it pushes people to a competitor who answered. it also filters out the enquiries that were never going to convert, which is a saving rather than a loss.
and use proof that is specific. a named client with an outcome beats a wall of logos; a short quote about a particular result beats a paragraph of praise. proof works when it is checkable, not when it is abundant. a review count with a rating is also stronger than a curated testimonial, because a visitor knows you did not select it.
— 03write shorter and plainer than feels comfortable.
almost every homepage is too long and too abstract. cut every sentence that could appear on a competitor's site, every superlative, and every phrase that survived because someone senior liked it.
the test is whether a stranger, on a phone, in a hurry, could describe what you do after fifteen seconds. if not, the problem is nearly always the headline and nearly always abstraction rather than length. ask someone outside the business to do that test rather than judging it yourself, since you cannot read your own page as a stranger.
and write it in the language customers use, not the language the industry uses. if clients say "we need someone to run our instagram", the page should not say "integrated social media ecosystem management". the phrasing customers use is also the phrasing they search, so plain language helps twice.
— 04the parts nobody thinks about.
check the page on a phone first, since that is where most visitors are, and check it on mobile data rather than office wifi. a homepage that takes six seconds to load has lost a share of its audience before any of the copy matters. large hero videos and font-heavy builds are the usual cause, and both are avoidable.
and get the mechanics right: a working contact route that suits your market — whatsapp in the gulf, not only a form — visible location, and navigation that names things plainly rather than cleverly. "services" and "pricing" outperform invented section names every time, because a visitor scanning a menu is not in the mood to decode it.
finally, treat it as a living page rather than a project. the homepage is the one asset every campaign and every referral passes through, which makes it worth revisiting quarterly against what people actually ask — the same discipline we apply to our own service pages, and the first thing we audit before recommending any paid spend.