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.
"Quality you can trust since 1998" tells me nothing. Trust for what? Roofing? Cakes? Tax returns?
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.
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.