Your homepage is not a brochure. It is a concierge.
A good concierge does not explain the entire hotel to you the moment you walk in. They read the situation, ask what you need, and point you toward the right door. A brochure tries to tell you everything at once. A concierge tells you the one thing that matters right now.
Most small business websites are built like brochures. They should be built with a concierge out front.
I gave Claude almost everything I have written or said in presentations about the process of developing more than 1000 websites over my career, and then asked it to distill my words into ten principles. And it has been a rather faithful mirror, so, here are those ten principles have held up over time. Not rules. Principles. Here they are, plainly.
1. The Hero Swap
Your customer is the hero. You are not.
Read your own homepage opening paragraph out loud. Count the times you use “we” and “our.” Then count “you” and “your.” If “we” wins, you have written a brochure about yourself. If “you” wins, you have written an invitation.
A visitor arriving at your site is not interested in you yet. They are interested in one thing: whether you can solve their problem. Bring your business in as the answer, not the headline.
2. Name It First
Name the problem before you offer the solution.
People do not buy solutions. They buy relief from a problem they already feel. Every problem worth naming has three layers. The external layer is what is practically wrong: a website that is out of date, a tax return avoided for two years. The internal layer is how that feels: embarrassed, anxious, overwhelmed. The philosophical layer is why it matters that this is happening to them at all.
Most websites only ever touch the external layer. That is a mistake. The internal layer is where a reader thinks, “this person understands exactly what I am going through.” Write all three layers down before you write a word of copy, and make sure the internal one is visible on your home page.
3. Direct, Don’t Lump
Structure follows audience, not services.
Most navigation gets built the way a business thinks about itself: service categories, departments, an internal filing system. But a visitor does not think in your categories. They think about their own situation.
If your different visitors carry meaningfully different problems, route them down different paths. If they share the same underlying fear, one page can speak to all of them without splitting anything. Map your pages to customer journeys, not your internal service list.
4. Speak Their Label
Navigation is a naming decision, not a filing decision.
“Business Accounting” describes what you do. “Your Business, Sorted” describes what your customer wants. One is a filing label. The other is a promise.
Too many websites act more like a corporate library than a helpful, living document, because every label was written from the inside looking out. Take every navigation item you have planned and ask: would my ideal customer actually say this out loud, in this order, using these words? If not, rewrite it in theirs.
5. The Concierge
The homepage points. It does not explain everything.
Think of the homepage as a concierge at the door, not a brochure on the table. Its three jobs: make the visitor feel recognised, give them a clear path forward, build just enough trust that they take it. That’s all. A homepage trying to explain everything about the business ends up explaining nothing well.
Here’s the part that surprises most people: write your homepage last, not first. By the time every inner page is written, you already know exactly what your business stands for and what language resonates. A homepage written before that thinking exists tends to be vague. A homepage written last is confident, because the heavy lifting happened elsewhere first.
6. Feel Seen First
Empathy before credentials.
People do not care what you know until they know you understand how they feel. The order that works: name the feeling, validate that it makes sense to feel that way, show the path out, and only then, prove you’re capable of leading them down it.
Compare “we have twenty years of experience” with “most people who come to us are not excited to be here, and that’s completely understandable.” One asks the visitor to be impressed before they’ve decided to trust you. The other tells them you already know what today feels like for them.
7. Say The Quiet Part
Objections belong on the page, not in your head.
Every service page should name the two or three reasons a genuinely interested visitor might still talk themselves out of contacting you, and answer them directly, in plain language, right there.
If a visitor is silently thinking a hesitation and your page says nothing about it, that silence reads as avoidance. Name the doubt plainly instead, and the visitor feels seen rather than suspicious. Write down every hesitation a real customer has ever voiced to you out loud, then answer each one at the exact point on the page where it would naturally arise.
8. Proof At The Doubt
Testimonials belong at the moment of hesitation, not collected at the bottom where nobody scrolls to read them properly.
By the time a visitor reaches the bottom of a page, they’ve usually already decided, one way or the other. A testimonial placed there arrives too late to do any persuading. Treat every testimonial as a direct answer to a specific objection. After you describe a problem, place a testimonial from someone who had exactly that problem. Just before your call to action, place one from someone who almost didn’t take the step, and is glad they did.
9. One Page, One Job
Every page does exactly one thing.
A page trying to introduce the business, explain every service, present the whole team, and ask for a booking, all in one scroll, ends up doing none of it well. Before you build any page, answer one question: what is the one thing I want a visitor to do when they leave this page? If you can’t answer in a sentence, the page doesn’t have a job yet. It has several, and that’s the problem.
A contact page is the clearest example. Address, phone number, hours, a map, one clear action. Nothing else competing for attention. The page is finished the moment it has what a visitor needs, and not one thing more.
10. Plain And Honest
Readability and honesty are structural, not stylistic.
Short sentences for high-stakes moments: headlines, calls to action, answers to objections. Section openings of two to four words to lower the barrier to reading on. A working target of 75 or above on the Flesch Reading Ease score. Plain words. Active voice. “You,” not “we.”
The second half of this principle surprises people: the most trusted websites know their own limits and say so. A page that tells the wrong visitor plainly, “this probably isn’t the right fit, here’s where to look instead,” builds more trust with everyone else reading it than a website trying to be right for absolutely everyone. Find one honest moment on your site where you tell the wrong visitor they’re in the wrong place. That single moment does more for your credibility than any claim you could make about yourself.
What This Means For AI Search, Too
Every one of these principles has a second payoff most business owners haven’t connected yet. AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions on your customer’s behalf before they ever reach your site, and those tools pull from pages with the same qualities that make a page work for a human: a clearly named problem, plain language, one job per page, and honest boundaries about who a service is and isn’t for.
A page built the way this article describes is naturally easier for an AI engine to extract, summarise, and cite correctly. A page built like a brochure, vague, everything-to-everyone, buried in “we” language, is much harder for AI to quote with confidence. Structure your site for a clear human reader, and you’ve done most of the work of structuring it for AI search as well. That is the approached used in our GEO Ready packages (Generative Engine Optimisation – search principles for AI search bots).
What To Do This Week
Pick three.
Run the word count test. Read your homepage opening paragraph out loud. Count “we” against “you.” Rewrite if “we” wins.
Find your quiet objection. Write down the one hesitation your customers voice most often, out loud, that your website never actually answers. Add it to the page where that doubt would naturally arise.
Give one page a job. Pick a single page on your current site and write, in one sentence, what you want a visitor to do when they leave it. If you can’t, that’s this week’s task.
Structure before design. Everything else is decoration.