Journal
Six pieces, newest first
- 01 Structure Your homepage is doing three jobs and none of them well Most small-business homepages try to introduce the company, list every service and close the sale on one screen. Pick one. The other two get their own page and both do better for it.
a homepage on a laptop, shot over the shoulder, office window light 4/5 - 02 Forms The quote form is where the money leaks Eleven fields, a captcha, and a thank-you page nobody reads. The form is the last thing anyone designs and the only thing standing between a visitor and a job. We start there.
a phone held one-handed, half-filled enquiry form on screen, dusk 4/5 - 03 Layout What actually belongs above the fold on a trades site Suburb, service, and a way to call. Everything else on that first screen is costing you the customer standing in a driveway on a phone with one bar of signal.
a tradesperson on a job site checking a phone, hard midday light 4/5 - 04 Performance Speed is a design decision, not a plugin You cannot cache your way out of a hero video, nine web fonts and a slider. We size the page before we style it, and by the time the caching layer arrives there is very little left for it to do.
a stopwatch and a laptop on a desk, single lamp, long shadows 4/5 - 05 Copy Stop writing about yourself on the page that sells Twenty years of experience is a fact about you. Same-day quote, fixed price, no mess is a fact about them. Only one of those gets read to the end, and it is not the one most sites lead with.
a printed page of website copy with half the sentences struck out 4/5 - 06 Scope The five-page site that beats the fifteen-page one Every extra page is another thing to write, another thing to keep true, and another place for a visitor to get lost. Here is the five we keep, and what happens to the ten we cut.
a hand-drawn sitemap on butcher paper, five boxes circled 4/5