When somebody sends me their website, I do the same thing every time. I open it on my phone, look at it for five seconds, and then look away. Then I ask myself three questions.
The three questions
- What does this business do?
- What town is it in?
- How do I get hold of them?
If I can't answer all three without scrolling, the site has a problem — no matter how good it looks. And a surprising number of nice-looking local websites fail this, usually because the top of the page is a big photo with a slogan on it.
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- 1What they do. "Central Kentucky's trusted roofing team" — you know it's roofing before you've decided to read anything.
- 2What town. Central Kentucky, said out loud, above the headline.
- 3How to reach them. A Call Now bar stuck to the bottom of the screen that never scrolls away.
"Quality you can trust since 1998" tells me nothing. Trust for what? Roofing? Cakes? Tax returns?
Write the headline first
Nearly every failure I see is the headline. It's a slogan when it should be a sentence that answers the first two questions at once. The formula is boring and it works: what you do, and where you do it.
- "Quality you can trust since 1998" → "Roof repair and replacement in Clark County."
- "Your comfort is our priority" → "Heating and air for Winchester homes, same-week appointments."
- "Excellence in every detail" → "Custom cabinets, built in a Kentucky woodshop."
None of those are clever. Clever is what you do on the second line, once the customer knows they're in the right place. The first line's whole job is to stop somebody leaving.
The test you can run on somebody else
Find a person who doesn't know your business — a neighbour, your brother-in-law, anybody. Hand them your phone with your homepage open, let them look for five seconds, then take it back and ask what the business does and what town it's in. If they hesitate, that's your answer, and it has nothing to do with whether the site looks nice. I've watched people do this with sites they paid several thousand dollars for.
What about the big photo?
The photo isn't the problem. A real picture of your work, your crew or your storefront at the top of the page is good — it's the fastest proof you're real. The problem is when the photo is the only thing up there, with a slogan sitting on top of it and everything useful pushed below the screen. Photo and answer, not photo instead of answer.
Why it matters more than it sounds
Somebody landing on your site has usually just tapped one of several search results. They have not committed to you. They're checking whether they're in the right place, and they're doing it fast. Every second they spend unsure is a second they might spend leaving.
The fix is almost never a redesign. It's usually rewriting one headline so it says what you do and where you do it, and making the phone number a button.
What goes on the second screen
Once the top of the page has done its job, the next thing down should be whatever makes somebody believe you. For most local trades that's proof: photos of real jobs, the towns you cover, a couple of reviews with real names on them. Not your company history. Nobody scrolls a contractor's website to read about a founding philosophy.
Then services, then prices if you publish them, then the form. In that order, because that's the order the questions arrive in: are you what I need, are you any good, what does it cost, how do I get you.
A quick way to audit the whole page: screenshot your homepage on a phone, then scroll and screenshot again, and again, until you hit the footer. Lay them out side by side. You'll see immediately whether the page answers questions in a sensible order or wanders — and you'll usually spot one whole screen that's doing nothing at all.
I take a real site apart section by section over on the How I Work page — including this exact bit — if you want to see what it looks like done properly.