Your Website Is the First Handshake
Most people will judge your business by your homepage before they ever meet you. Worth designing the introduction.
Before someone calls, emails, or walks in, they look you up. They land on your homepage, spend somewhere between three and twenty seconds, and form an opinion that's surprisingly hard to shift later. That opinion is your handshake.
What's strange is how rarely businesses treat it that way. They'll rehearse a pitch, agonise over a logo, repaint a shopfront — and then leave the homepage as whatever the last agency built two redesigns ago. The visitor's first impression is, in effect, outsourced to a stranger from 2019.
Your website should feel like the moment you walk into a room — confident, clear, dressed for the job, glad to see them. It should sound like you on a good day. It should make the next step obvious without being pushy about it.
Design the handshake. Everything else gets easier when the first thirty seconds go well.