The five jobs your homepage has to do

Forget homepage trends for a moment. Strip away the animation styles and layout fashions and a homepage has five jobs. Most business websites I audit are skipping at least two of them, usually without knowing.

Here is the checklist I run before any homepage design starts.

1. Say what you do, in words

The first screen should tell a stranger what you do, who you do it for, and where, in plain words. Not a slogan. Slogans are what businesses write when they assume everyone already knows them. "Brands built to be seen" works on my site only because the next line says exactly what I do and the work is one scroll away. If your headline could sit on a competitor's site unchanged, it is not doing the job.

2. Prove it fast

Claims are wallpaper. Evidence is what registers: real projects, real client names, real numbers where you are allowed to share them, photography of your actual work rather than stock imagery. One genuine case study outweighs a paragraph of adjectives. If you have testimonials, use the ones that describe a result, not the ones that say you were lovely to deal with. Lovely is nice. Specific is persuasive.

3. Orient the visitor

Different people arrive wanting different things: one wants prices, one wants to see work, one wants to know if you serve their industry, one is ready to get in touch. The homepage is a junction, and its navigation should read like signposts written in your customers' language. If your menu items need explaining, they are the wrong menu items.

4. Handle the doubt

Every buyer arrives with a quiet objection. Too expensive, too small, too far away, probably too busy, might not handle my industry. The strongest homepages answer the big objection in plain sight instead of hoping nobody thinks it. On my site, the obvious doubt about a one person studio is capacity, so the site addresses working with one senior person directly rather than hiding it. Name your equivalent and answer it on the page.

5. Ask for one thing

Decide the single action you most want a visitor to take, then make it unmissable and repeat it down the page. One primary ask. When a homepage asks for six things with equal weight, it is asking for nothing. Everything else can live a click away.

The test

Show your homepage to someone outside your industry for ten seconds. Then ask what you do, who it is for, and what they would click first. If any answer is a guess, you now know which of the five jobs is going undone. That is your redesign brief, and it is a better one than any trend list.