Five Questions to Answer Before You Design a Homepage
Five questions, answered in plain sentences, before anything is drawn.
Before a homepage is designed, five questions are worth answering in plain sentences. The answers settle most of what the page has to say before anything is drawn.
The Five Questions
- Who lands on this page, and what were they doing a minute before?
- What do they believe about the problem before they arrive?
- What is the one thing they should do next?
- What would make them doubt you?
- Which sentence about the product would you defend in front of a customer?
Why Plain Sentences
Founders often answer with the language of the pitch deck: platform, seamless, next-generation. It's more useful to answer the way you'd explain the product to a friend at dinner. That version is usually much closer to a headline a visitor understands.
What Usually Changes
Question four does the most work. The doubts a visitor has are the sections the page needs: pricing that's unclear, a team nobody has heard of, an integration that might not exist. The answers go into the outline of the home page, which I write before any design.
If you're preparing a launch and want help with the page, see website design or tell me about the project.