Six jobs for the first screen
Before any scrolling, a stranger should be able to answer all of these. If yours cannot, nothing further down will rescue it.
What you do
In the words a customer would use, not your industry's words. "Bookkeeping for tradespeople", not "financial operations partner".
Who it is for
Naming your customer is not narrowing your market. It is how the right person recognises themselves.
Where you do it
For a local business this is not optional. It is often the single most-searched part of your offer.
What it roughly costs
Even a starting-from figure. Silence on price does not make people call to find out; it makes them assume they cannot afford you.
Proof you are real
A photo of the actual premises, a named person, a licence number, a genuine review. One real thing beats five generic badges.
The next step
One primary action, repeated. Not five equally weighted buttons that make the visitor choose how to buy from you.
What belongs below the fold
Roughly in this order, because it follows the order people worry in:
- Services, briefly. Three to six, each one line, each linking somewhere fuller if it deserves a page.
- How it works. Three or four steps. This removes more anxiety per word than anything else on a small-business site, because most people are not afraid of the price, they are afraid of the process.
- Evidence. Real work, real words from real customers. Never invented ones — and if you have none yet, say what you do have instead.
- The awkward questions. A short FAQ that answers what people actually ask, including the ones you would rather avoid.
- Contact, in full. Not a link to a contact page. The details, on the page, where someone standing in a driveway can tap them.
Things to cut
- A carousel. Visitors do not wait for slide three. You are hiding your two best messages behind a timer.
- "Welcome to our website." The reader knows where they are. This sentence has never persuaded anyone of anything.
- Stock photos of a boardroom. Four unrelated people laughing at a laptop tells a visitor precisely nothing, except that the pictures are not of you.
- Invented numbers. "500+ happy clients" when you have had thirty. People check. The QA script I run on client sites actively looks for claims like this, because I once caught a draft of my own boasting about thousands of engineering teams for a studio with no clients at all. It was generated in seconds and it was a lie.
- A mission statement, up top. Fine on the About page. Not the first thing a stranger needs.
Write it in the wrong order on purpose
Write the contact section first, then the FAQ, then the services, and write the headline last. By the time you have answered forty real questions you will have said the sharp version of your offer by accident, somewhere in the middle of an answer. That sentence is your headline. It is almost never the one you would have written on a blank page.