Your website is not a brochure. It's a first shift.
A brochure gets picked up, skimmed, and put back down. Nobody trusts it or distrusts it — it's just paper.
Your website isn't that. It's the first five minutes of a new employee's first shift, except the “employee” is meeting hundreds of potential customers a month, and you don't get to coach them beforehand.
If that employee shows up looking unsure of what your business does, customers leave and hire someone else — usually someone whose work is worse than yours, but whose “employee” showed up looking sharp.
The test
Open your site on your phone. Give yourself five seconds. Can you tell, without scrolling, what the business does, who it's for, and what to do next? If you hesitate — even for a second — a stranger with less patience than you already left.
This isn't about looking fancy. It's about being unmistakable, fast. That's the whole job of a homepage.
— Heste Design Studio