A website should explain the product in ten seconds

The homepage has one job in the first ten seconds: say what the product does, for whom, and why anyone should believe it. If that takes a scroll, the rest of the page is doing damage control. This sounds obvious. It is also the thing most sites get wrong, including sites built by very good teams, because the people writing the headline know too much about the product to see it from outside.

One sentence

I write the sentence before I open a design tool, and I argue about it longer than about any layout. The test is simple. Read it to someone who has never heard of the product and ask them to repeat back what it does. If they cannot, it is not done. Clever headlines fail this test constantly. Plain ones pass.

Three proofs

A number, a name, a demo. A number is a result a customer got. A name is a customer people recognize, or a quote from one. A demo is the product itself, moving, in the first screen. Not all three are always available, but two of them usually are, and the first screen exists to deliver them.

Everything else on the first screen is a distraction from these four things, the sentence and the three proofs. That includes the clever headline you are attached to.

The fold is not dead, it is just lower

People do scroll. But they decide whether to scroll in the first screen. A hero that is beautiful and vague loses the decision. A hero that is plain and clear wins it, and then the beauty further down gets seen. The order matters. Clarity buys attention, and attention is what the rest of the page spends.

What this does to the rest of the page

Once the first screen has made the promise, every section below it has a clear job: back the promise up. Show the work. Explain how it works. Answer the objections in the order people have them. End with the action. Sections that do not back the promise up get cut, which is how a page gets shorter and better at the same time.

Clever is what you write when you are not sure what you mean.

My own example

My hero says I build experiences that define brands, and the two inline images show what that looks like before you have read a word. That is the ten second version. The sections below it are the longer one: the work, the services, how I think, and how to start. Each exists because it backs up the sentence at the top. When I add a section, that is the test it has to pass.