What your first page actually needs

You need a page, not a site. A site has an About, a Services, a Blog, a Contact and a navigation bar to move between them. A page has one job: take a person who has just arrived and get them to do one thing.

Building a site before you have customers is the most comfortable way to avoid selling that has ever been invented. There is always another section to add, and none of it is a conversation with someone who might pay you.

What the page has to contain

1. 01A headline that says who it is for and what they get. Not your company name. Not a slogan. If a stranger reads one line and cannot tell whether this is for them, nothing below it matters.
2. 02A short paragraph that describes the problem in their words, from your notes.
3. 03What they get, as a short list. This is the one page offer, trimmed.
4. 04Some reason to believe you. Harder at the start, and there is an honest version below.
5. 05The price, or an honest reason it is not shown.
6. 06One action. One. A button, a form, a booking link, an email address.

Writing the headline

The headline is most of the page's job and is usually the last thing written, because you cannot summarise an offer you have not finished describing. The reliable shape is plain: who it is for, and what changes.

• Stock ordering for independent restaurants, in an hour a week instead of six. Names the buyer, names the change, contains a number.
• We deliver operational excellence for hospitality. Names nobody and promises nothing a reader can picture.
• Nimbus Ops. A company name is not a headline. The reader does not know who you are and has no reason to find out from a word they have never seen.

If a specific number is honest, use it, because a number is the fastest thing to believe. If you do not have one yet, describe the state the buyer ends in rather than the service you perform. The reader is shopping for an outcome, not a method.

The proof problem

You have no testimonials, because you have no customers. Do not invent them, and do not use the stock photographs of smiling people that fool nobody. There are honest alternatives.

• Show the work. A screenshot, a before and after, a sample, a short example of the thing you produce.
• Show that you understand the problem. A page that describes their situation more precisely than they could is itself a form of proof.
• Say what you have done before, even if it was inside a job rather than for your own clients.
• Offer something that reduces their risk: a small first piece of work, a clear refund position, a call before any money moves.

What to build it with

Whatever gets it live today. A site builder, a single hand written HTML file, a document with a public link, a form service. Nobody has ever declined to buy because the page was built with the wrong tool. Many people have never launched because they were choosing one.

You will rebuild this page. Possibly several times. That is expected, and it is an argument for making the first one quickly rather than making it well.

Common mistakes

• A headline about you instead of them.
• Describing your process instead of their outcome. Nobody is buying your process.
• No price and no explanation of why there is no price, which reads as expensive and evasive.
• A contact form as the only action, when the honest next step is a conversation.
• Three different things on offer, because you could not decide.
• An About section above the offer. Your story is interesting after somebody wants the thing, not before.

How to tell whether it works

With a handful of visitors, analytics will not tell you much. Two cheaper tests will.

1. 01Show it to one person who matches your buyer and ask them to say, in their own words, what it is offering and who for. If they get it wrong, the page is wrong, not them.
2. 02Watch somebody read it without explaining anything. Where they scroll back up is where the page failed to answer something.

Both of those find more problems in ten minutes than a month of staring at it alone, and neither requires traffic you do not have yet.