I wrote about my own website. The reader wanted to know what I do.

I rewrote the pages that describe my two ventures this week, read the first draft back the next morning, and threw most of it away.

The writing wasn't bad. It was just about the wrong thing. It described the machinery: that one runs on WordPress, that the blog targets the same audience, that there are roughly a dozen location pages. All true, all completely irrelevant to the only person who would ever read that page on purpose.

Because the website isn't the project. The website is where someone finds out whether the work behind it is any use to them.

Infrastructure-first writing is a very easy trap

It happens because the person writing built the thing. You've spent months on the structure, so the structure feels like the achievement, and describing it feels like substance rather than trivia.

It's the same instinct that produces an "our approach" section written as an internal job description. I even had a template inviting me to do it — a "my role" block sitting near the top, which more or less guarantees the page opens by talking about me.

Nielsen Norman Group have measured what that costs. Their research on how long people stay on a page found that most visitors leave within ten to twenty seconds, and that pages which communicate a clear value proposition quickly hold attention far longer — the first ten seconds decide whether you get the next two minutes. Their homepage usability guidelines lead with the same instruction: say what the organisation does, in the visitor's language, before anything else.

Ten seconds is not enough time to explain your CMS.

Tim Brown writes in Change by Design that design is now too important to be left to designers. The words on a page work the same way — they're too important to be left to the person who built the thing being described.

The order that actually works

I rebuilt both pages on the same sequence, and I'd now use it for anything describing a service: who this is for, what you actually get, how it starts, and only then what my role in it is.

Role last. Not because it doesn't matter — it's the reason someone hires a person rather than an agency — but because it only means something once the reader has recognised themselves in the first paragraph.

Two rewrites in particular forced me to be honest.

The first is my local practice, which is genuinely just me: I either run a company's marketing alongside their team, or I coach the team to run it themselves. Writing that down made me commit to a line I've said out loud for years and never published — I would rather leave a team that no longer needs me than build a dependency. That's an uncomfortable sentence to put on a page that exists to attract work, and it's the truest thing on it.

The second is the collective I co-founded, and that page needed the opposite move. That venture is deliberately bigger than me: a network of specialists, where the depth behind whoever you end up working with is the actual product. It only works if it delivers on engagements I'm not on. So the page says what I am, and then says what I'm deliberately not — the bottleneck.

Naming the thing you're not is a positioning tool

Most positioning pages are additive. Every capability, every sector, every service, because leaving something out feels like leaving money on the table. What you get is a page nobody can summarise back to you.

The sentences that did the most work in this rewrite were the subtractive ones. Not the bottleneck. Not a dependency. Not a retainer that quietly renews forever. Each of those tells a reader more about how an engagement will feel than another paragraph of capability ever would — and each one filters out a conversation that was going to end badly anyway.

That's the same reason I now put every hour into the quote where the client can see the working. Openness isn't a sales tactic, it's a filter. Companies plan in budgets and calendars; being legible about how something is built and what it takes to run saves everyone the two calls it takes to find out.

What I'd tell anyone rewriting their own page

Read your draft and mark every sentence whose subject is you, your company, or your tooling. If that's most of the page, you've written a specification, not an offer.

Then check whether the page survives without any proof metrics at all, because a young venture often doesn't have them — I've argued before that when you have no numbers to show, the thing to sell is the removal of risk. Clarity about who it's for and how it starts does more of that job than any statistic.

And write the version where the reader is a busy person with a real problem and no interest whatsoever in your architecture. That reader is the only one who was ever going to hire you. The rest of us are just admiring the plumbing.

Sources & further reading

External
How long do users stay on web pages? — Nielsen Norman Group, on the ten-second window and what a clear value proposition buys you.
113 design guidelines for homepage usability — Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group.

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