Writing the first page

The first page is the page most clients spend the least time on and the page that does the most work.

By “first page” I mean the first piece of writing a visitor reads on a site. Often the home page. Sometimes the About page. For sites that lead with content, the most recent post. The page that establishes, in a few hundred words, what the company is, who it serves, and what the visitor should do next.

Most small-business first pages are bad. The reasons are predictable.

The page is usually written by committee. The founder wants to mention every product. The marketing lead wants to mention every customer. The CEO wants to mention the company’s mission. The result is a paragraph that mentions everything and explains nothing.

The page is usually written for the company’s friends. People who already know what the company does, who buy from it, who like the founders. The friends do not need an explanation. The audience the page is actually trying to reach does need an explanation, and is getting none.

The page is usually written in jargon. “Strategic partner.” “Holistic approach.” “Tailored solutions.” Phrases that the team has internalised so deeply that they have forgotten the audience does not share the meaning.

A few rules I have settled on for writing first pages.

Lead with what the company does, in the simplest possible terms. “We make websites for small businesses.” “We sell organic vegetables to restaurants in Greater Manchester.” “We are a husband-and-wife team that runs a boutique guesthouse in Donegal.” The reader knows, in one sentence, what kind of business this is. The reader can then decide whether to keep reading.

Follow with who the company is for. Not the technical specification of the audience. The audience as a person. “If you are a small business owner who needs a website that works without daily maintenance, this is for you.” “If you are a chef who cooks with vegetables that taste like vegetables, this is for you.”

Then say what makes the company a different choice from the competition. Specific. Honest. Not “we are the best at what we do.” Something the reader can act on: “We have been doing this for fifteen years, and most of our work is repeat clients.” “We grow eight varieties of tomatoes that our distributors do not have access to.”

End with an invitation. Specific. Singular. “Send us an email and we’ll reply within three working days.” Not “Get in touch via the form, sign up to the newsletter, follow us on Instagram, download the whitepaper, or schedule a discovery call.”

The four together, in roughly two hundred words, do more for a small business’s website than the rest of the site combined.

A practical exercise. The next time you are writing a first page, write it without the company’s name in the first paragraph. If the paragraph still works, the first page is doing its job. If the paragraph collapses without the company’s name to anchor it, the first page is leaning on the company’s name to do work the writing should do.

Most first pages I see, run through this exercise, collapse. The fix is to rewrite the first paragraph until it does not. The rewrite, on most projects, takes longer than the rest of the design work for the page combined, and is worth it.

Two books that have shaped how I think about this: On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. The companion piece on writing for the client to read aloud covers the read-aloud test, which is the next exercise to run after the company-name exercise above.