Olga KolgushevaAs a web designer, I work with a lot of new business owners, and I've noticed that a website is a strange thing to ask of someone who is just starting out. It's one big document that is supposed to explain everything about a business that doesn't fully exist yet. People sit down to write it and have no idea what goes where, or what to say at all.
Over the years I've landed on a small coaching exercise that I walk my clients through before we touch a single page. It works because the confusion almost always comes down to two questions. The first is audience: who is this for, which group of people do you actually want to serve. The second is the offering itself. Some people create far too many offerings and spread themselves thin. Others struggle to narrow theirs down into something concrete, enticing, and a little bit unique, while still being simple enough for a stranger to understand in a few seconds.
Here is the exercise.
Imagine it's 1998 and you just opened an office on Main Street
Picture a busy street in your city. On one side of you there's a restaurant, on the other side a hair salon, and in between them is your office with your name on the door. The internet exists, technically, but there's no social media, only a handful of businesses have websites, and nobody expects to find out about you by looking you up. People learn what you do by walking past.
There's plenty of foot traffic. People see your door, they see the sign on it, and they see the flyer you've taped up in the window. That flyer has one job: it has to say enough to make someone open the door and start talking to your receptionist.
Most of the people who walk in aren't ready to book anything on the spot. So your receptionist hands them a single printed page, letter-sized, maybe folded into a brochure, that lays out what you offer. They take it home, read it over dinner, and decide whether to come back.
So here's the question I ask my clients: what do you put on that door, and what goes on that one page?
Most people can answer this surprisingly quickly. They know what the sign would say. They know what the three or four things on the page would be. And it turns out they've just written their website.
The door is your hero screen, the flyer is your offer
Whatever you'd put on that front door is exactly what belongs on the hero screen of your website. It's the one line a passerby reads in two seconds, and it tells them who you are and whether they're in the right place. If you'd write "Family dentistry, new patients welcome" on the door, that's your headline. You don't need anything cleverer than that.
The one-page handout is your offering. It's the thing people take away and consider, which means it has to be short enough to fit on a page and clear enough that someone can explain it to their spouse. If you can't get it onto a single sheet, you probably have too many offerings, or you haven't decided yet which one you're really selling. This is where most of the narrowing-down happens, and it happens naturally, because a page only has so much room.
Then there's the ad you'd run in the local paper, something like 20% off your first appointment. That's a tripwire offer: a small, low-risk way for someone to try you out before committing to anything bigger. And your one-page flyer needs to point to the next step a reader would reasonably take, which for most service businesses is booking an introductory appointment.
That's the whole thing. A sign on the door, a one-page flyer, a small first offer, and a clear next step. Those are the pieces that go on your first business website, and they're also the first things you're going to sell. Once you can answer the 1998 version of the question, the website stops being a mysterious document and becomes a fairly simple one.
Putting your flyer online
I built a tool for this. It's called Bento, and it exists for exactly this moment, when you're a service business selling online and you need a clean way to show people what you do and let them say yes.
In Bento you compose your offer out of engaging, interactive sections, the way you'd lay out that flyer, so a reader actually understands what they're getting. You can attach a contract to it and set up a payment plan, and the person on the other end can read, sign, and pay from a single page. There's nothing to configure before you can send your first one.
If you've just worked through the 1998 exercise and you know what your flyer says, Bento is where you put it up. Give it a try and send me your first offer, I'd love to see it.