Show value immediatelyShow value immediately

I like the wind metaphor because it reminds you how impersonal the stream of traffic is. The vast majority of people who visit your site will be casual visitors¹. It's them you have to design your site for. The people who really care will find what they want by themselves.

The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back button². Think about your own experience: most links you follow lead to something lame. Anyone who has used the web for more than a couple weeks has been trained to click on Back after following a link. So your site has to say "Wait! Don't click on Back. This site isn't lame. Look at this, for example."

There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about³. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did? For example, the corporate site that says the company makes

enterprise content management solutions⁴ for business that enable organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership.

An established company may get away with such an opaque description, but no startup can. A startup should be able to explain in one or two sentences exactly what it does. And not just to users. You need this for everyone: investors, acquirers, partners, reporters, potential employees, and even current employees. You probably shouldn't even start a company to do something that can't be described compellingly in one or two sentences.

The other thing I repeat is to give people everything you've got, right away⁵. If you have something impressive, try to put it on the front page, because that's the only one most visitors will see. Though indeed there's a paradox here: the more you push the good stuff toward the front, the more likely visitors are to explore further.

In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell visitors what your site is about by showing them. One of the standard pieces of advice in fiction writing is "show, don't tell⁶." Don't say that a character's angry; have him grind his teeth, or break his pencil in half. Nothing will explain what your site does so well as using it.⁷