The questions a homepage has to answer in the first screen
Someone arriving on your homepage decides very quickly whether to stay. They are looking for answers to a handful of plain questions, and most homepages answer the wrong ones first.
- Nº
- 03
- Published
- Read
- 2 min
- Category
- Design
- Written by
- Revylio
A homepage is not a brochure. Nobody reads it top to bottom. People arrive, look at the first screen, and decide whether they are in the right place. Everything below that screen only gets read if the first one did its job.
What they are asking
Whatever the business, the visitor is asking roughly the same things, in roughly this order:
- What is this? In words they would use, not the words the company uses internally.
- Is it for someone like me? The right trade, the right size, the right place.
- Can I trust it? Who else uses it, how long it has been around, whether it looks cared for.
- What do I do next? One obvious step, not seven equal ones.
Most homepages answer the third question first, with a slogan, and the first question never.
Say what it is, plainly
The headline is the most valuable space on the site, and it is usually spent on something that could belong to any company: Excellence in every detail. Your partner for growth. A visitor cannot act on that.
Compare a headline that just says what the business does, for whom, and where. It is less clever and far more useful, because it answers the question the visitor actually has.
If the headline would still make sense on a competitor's site, it is not doing its job.
One next step
Every link on the first screen competes with every other one. When there are six buttons of equal weight, the visitor has to make a decision before they have any reason to. The easiest decision is to leave.
Pick the one action that matters most, make it the obvious button, and let everything else be a link further down.
Then earn the scroll
Below the first screen, the page can slow down: the services in more detail, the work, the people, the process, the answers to the questions that come up in every sales call. That part of the page is for the visitor who has already decided to stay. It is the first screen that decides whether there are any.
