Nine out of ten homepages we audit lead with “We are a creative agency dedicated to delivering bespoke solutions“. Here’s a teardown of why that fails, plus the five-question brief we use instead.

01The placeholder problem

Most homepages aren’t bad. They’re unfinished. Someone — usually the designer — typed something into the hero block to keep the layout from collapsing. Eight months later, that placeholder is still there. It’s now the first thing every customer reads.

The classic version reads like this:

The placeholder version has more words, but says almost nothing. It could be on any agency’s homepage. It tells you nothing about who they help, how, or what makes them different.

02The 5-question brief we use instead

When a client hires us to rewrite their homepage, we don’t start with “what do you do?” — that question gets you the placeholder. We start with these five:

1. Who’s the one customer I’m writing for? Not your audience. One person. Picture them, name them, know what they had for breakfast.
2. What was their day like before they found you? What were they trying to do? What was annoying about it?
3. What’s the one thing you do better than anyone they’ve tried? Be specific. “Faster” is not specific. “First draft in 5 days” is.
4. What’s the proof? Numbers, names, screenshots, anything. People believe specifics, not adjectives.
5. What’s the single next action they should take? One. Not three.

The answers go on a single index card. The homepage is then written only from what’s on that card. Anything that doesn’t connect to those five answers gets deleted.

03Show the work, hide the workshop

A common mistake: agencies and consultancies love telling visitors how they work. The phased process. The discovery sprint. The framework with a clever name.

Your customer doesn’t care.

They care about whether you’ve done this for someone like them, and how it turned out. Show the work. Hide the workshop.

Process is what you sell to investors and procurement teams. Outcomes are what you sell to customers.

— a copywriter we trust

04Three real examples (anonymised)

Three rewrites from the last six months, all with the client’s permission. We’ve changed names and industries to keep things anonymous, but the structure is identical.

Example 1 — A boutique skincare brand

Example 2 — A B2B SaaS analytics tool

Example 3 — A wedding photographer

In every case: the rewrite is shorter. It mentions fewer features. It feels more specific. It works harder.

05The “delete and clarify” rule

Once you’ve drafted your homepage hero, read every sentence and ask one question:

Would my smartest, most-pressed-for-time customer actually finish this sentence?

If the answer is “probably not”, delete it. Then write something shorter that they would finish.

06What to ship today

You don’t need to commission a full rewrite to fix your homepage this afternoon. Here’s a 30-minute exercise that’ll get you 80% of the way there:

1. Answer the five questions on an index card.
2. Write three different versions of your hero headline. Keep them all under 12 words.
3. Send each version to three customers. Ask which sounds most like the company they hired.
4. Use the winner.

That’s it. No design changes. No new framework. Just words that earn their position above the fold.

If you’d like a second opinion on what’s there now — or just a hand rewriting it — drop us a brief. We’ll send a quote within one working day.