The first screen. A large photograph of a glass facade your company does not have. Across it, "Welcome to our website", and below that, "Quality and reliability since 2011".
The person who opened that page arrived with a question. Do you sand parquet floors. Do you come out to Võru. Can you do it next week. They did not arrive with time to spare for your site.
Both sentences are polite and true. They simply do nothing. "Welcome" answers no question. The firm your customer goes to next writes "quality and reliability" about itself too.
Most websites are not badly written. They are written the way it feels they ought to be, and then they tell the reader nothing they came to find out.
The five second test
Open your home page on a phone and look only at what fits on the screen before you scroll. Four things need to be there.
- What you do. Not your line of work, the job. "Sanding and lacquering floors", not "complete surface coating solutions".
- For whom. A house or a factory. A private owner or a building firm. Those two want different things from your page.
- Where. Tartu and a hundred kilometres around it. With no place name the reader has to guess, and a guess leans towards "probably not".
- What the next step is. One thing, not three. A number you can tap on a phone.
Four things, one screen. This is not a design job, it fits into three sentences. If your first screen says only that you exist and are pleased somebody came, the most expensive space on the site goes on politeness.
The substitution test
If you remember one thing from this article, make it this one. Take a sentence off your site. Replace your company name with a competitor's. If the sentence stays exactly as true and tells the reader nothing about what they are buying, delete it.
Try it on three sentences that sit on almost every site.
- "We are a quality, reliable partner." Put the competitor's name in. Still true. Delete.
- "Our mission is to offer clients the best service." Still true. Delete.
- "An individual approach to every client." Still true even of the firm that does not do it. Delete.
None of them is false, and that is exactly the problem. A sentence that is true of everybody helps the reader choose nobody. The reader does not read it, they recognise it and move on.
Now the same test on a sentence that survives. "We sand parquet dust free, because the machine has an extractor on it, and you can move back in the same evening." Put a competitor's name in. If it goes false, the sentence is good. If it happens to be true of them as well, it still stays, because it tells the reader what they are buying. The test is not hunting for a unique sentence, it is throwing out the empty ones.
Run the test on the whole home page at once. Usually most of the text goes and what is left is what should have been at the top.
Call the thing what your customer calls it
Every trade grows a vocabulary that is precise among its own and empty outside. "Complete surface coating solutions" means sanding floors.
Somebody with a scratched floor does not search for "surface coating". They search for "parquet sanding Tartu". Your site speaks the language you use in meetings.
There is a visibility side to this too. A search engine finds your page by the words that are actually on it, and an AI assistant can only recommend you when your page uses the words the person asking used. A site written in trade language is found by neither, and the reason is not technical. Both search engine optimisation and being findable by an assistant start in the same place.
The check: write down three sentences customers use on the phone to describe your work and look for those words on your site. If they are not there, you wrote the site for your colleagues.
Talk about what changes for the customer
The second common pattern is listing the equipment. "We use professional German machinery." Good. So what? "We have our own trailer and lift." What is different for me?
The difference is in the second half of the sentence. The tool is "we have a sander with dust extraction". The change is "the dust does not get into your cupboards and you do not have to wrap the flat in plastic".
That half goes unwritten because you already know it. Put one question to every claim on your site: what changes for me if this is true? If no answer comes, it is an inventory list.
Count "we" and "you"
Take the text off your home page and count how many times it says "we", "us" and "our", and how many times it turns to the reader at all: "you", "your", "yours". Whether you write "you" or "our clients" is not the point. Whether the page names them at all is.
The usual result: "we" several times, the reader not once. That is a page talking about itself to somebody who came about themselves. The ratio need not be a particular number, but zero is too few.
The repair is mechanical. "We offer removals across Estonia" turns into "We move your office in a day, even when the new building is in another town". Same fact, other end first.
The about page everybody underrates
Open your analytics and see where "about us" ranks. It usually sits higher than the owner expects: somebody weighing up giving you money wants to know who they are talking to. And what they find there is four sentences written because the menu had that item in it. "The company was founded with the aim of offering clients a quality service." Substitution test: still true, says nothing. Delete.
Five things belong there, and they fit in one paragraph.
- Who does the work. A name, not "our team".
- How long. A year, not an adjective.
- Where. Town, parish, region.
- One face. Yours, taken on a phone, work clothes on and bad light. A poor photograph of a real person does more than a flawless one of somebody who does not work for you.
- One real sentence. Why you do this work, or how you ended up in it.
The fifth is the only one a competitor cannot copy. "I started in my father's workshop and never left" goes false with another name on it. That is exactly why it works.
How to write when you are not a writer
Most people do not get stuck because they cannot write, but because opening a blank document makes them start writing in website language. The same person explains the same thing clearly on the phone two minutes later.
So do this. Start the voice recorder on your phone and explain your work the way you would explain it to a friend. Talk for three minutes, including the thing people most often get wrong. Then type the recording out, take out the repetitions and leave the rest alone. That is your website copy.
Your best text already exists. You say it on the phone every week, nobody has just written it down. It disappears when you write, because writing turns into performing. Talking does not.
An honest note: writing copy is something we charge for too, so I am talking about my own trade here. But the voice recorder is in your pocket and you make those three minutes yourself either way. If you then want somebody to cross out a third of what you said, that is our part.
Price: silence is worse than a wrong number
"From" pricing is bad in one case only: when the number is untrue. If it is there to pull people in and the real invoice is three times higher, you lose that person twice.
But silence is worse. Somebody who does not know whether they are talking about a hundred or ten thousand will not write to ask. They go to a page where the number is there. You see nothing of it: in the statistics they look like every other visitor who came and left.
A range, a starting figure with what it includes, or one honest sentence about what moves the price. All three beat "ask for a quote" on its own. There is a separate piece on this blog about what a website costs in Estonia, and the same logic holds for any service.
You do not have to pay anybody for this
Almost all of this you can do yourself. The substitution test is reading and deleting, the five second test is one look at a phone screen, the recording is three minutes. The about page takes longest, and that is one evening.
This is writing, not technology. A slow site and a site Google cannot find are separate problems with separate work attached. But a sentence that does nothing does not start doing something because it loads faster. And if the first screen is right, the price is out, and still no enquiries come, then the enquiry is being lost somewhere else.
The test you have not run yet
Read your home page aloud to somebody who does not know your work, and do not fix sentences as you go. The place where they ask "what does that mean?" is the sentence you have to rewrite. The place where they say "oh, I thought you did something else" is telling you the fault is on your first screen. You are hearing your own text from the outside for the first time, and it is the one test here you cannot do alone.
Try it on us as well. If there is a sentence on our site that stays true with a competitor's name on it and tells you nothing about what you are buying, that one is our own fault.
Frequently asked questions
Four things, and they fit into three sentences. What you do, and name the job rather than the trade: "sanding and lacquering floors" is a job, "complete surface coating solutions" is not. Who you do it for, because a homeowner and a building firm want different things from the page. Where you do it, because without a place name the reader is left guessing, and the guess usually goes against you. And what the next step is: one thing, not three, such as a number you can tap on a phone. If the first screen says only that you exist, then the most expensive space on the site is paying for politeness alone.
Run the substitution test. Read one of your sentences as though a rival firm's name stood in it instead of yours. If it is still just as true, and still says nothing about what the reader is buying, it does nothing and can be deleted. "We are a quality, reliable partner", "our mission is to offer the best service" and "an individual approach to every client" all fail it. None of them is false, but a claim that fits every firm alike leaves the reader nothing to choose on. Do not work through it sentence by sentence: put the entire front page through the test in one go, and only then can you see how little of it earns its place.
Five things, and they fit into one paragraph. Who does the work, by name, not "our team". How long, with a year, not an adjective. Where, down to the town or region. One face, and it has to be recognisably yours rather than generic: a picture taken on a phone at work does more than a flawless studio shot. And one real sentence about why you do this work or how you ended up in it. That last one is the only thing a competitor cannot copy. "The company was founded with the aim of offering clients a quality service" stays true with a competitor's name on it and tells the reader nothing, so it can come down.
Yes, at least the order of magnitude. The question is not whether the number is exact, it is whether the reader can tell they are in the right bracket at all. Three forms work: a range with both ends on it, a starting figure with a list of what it covers, or one sentence about what moves the price, whether that is square metres, the height of the floor or the deadline. "From" only turns dangerous when it is bait: if your real invoice regularly lands well above the starting figure, the fault is in the figure, not on the page. And if you are afraid the number will scare people off, mostly it scares off the ones who were going to leave anyway, only earlier.
Read next
More visitors than last year, the same quiet inbox, and two expensive conclusions waiting at that fork. The enquiry is usually lost in the last thirty seconds of a visit, and almost everything broken in there is small and boring.