What is the objective of every home page on a commercial web site?
It must be two-fold. First, to communicate with the prospective customer in a manner that the customer understands and appreciates. Secondly, to use that communication to persuade him that the product or service being sold is just what he has been looking for to solve his problem.
The first objective requires an ability to write in a tone that touches a nerve with the reader. It tells him that you the webmaster understand his problem and can supply the solution to it. Perhaps you had the same problem yourself at one time and, after searching, found the solution to it, or maybe you know someone else who had the problem and discovered how they dealt with it.
The second objective is the more difficult. It requires that you succeed in getting your reader to accept that what you are offering him is right for him. Not just that it has worked for others, or that it is cheaper and has more benefits for him than other, similar, products, but that it completely covers his situation from every angle.
In other words you have to persuade him. Just as in the case of an orator before the Senate, or an advocate before a court of law. The objective is the same. You have to get inside the mind of the prospective customer, understand his fears and hopes, his ambitions, his loves and hates.
Vocalise them – put them into words. Articulate them. Relate them to your product, and the benefits your product can bring to his life. This should be a natural flow, moving logically but with emotion from the exposure of his fears and the problem he is faced with to the future he can look forward to with his problem solved, thanks to your product.
That’s the power of persuasion. And when it’s done well, it’s hardly persuasion at all, just a lifting of the veil of ignorance to reveal what was obvious all along.
