At the bare minimum, the home page or landing page of your website needs to communicate to your visitors within the first 10 seconds of landing there the following two messages:

1. precisely what the value is that you are offering (i.e., what is the nature of your product or service)

and

2. specifically to whom (to what type of individual or organization) you are offering that value

Every week I visit countless websites - run by everything from Fortune 500 corporations to small businesses alike - that assume (wrongly) that 100% of the visitors to their site already know the answers to these two questions and that these questions are therefore not worth addressing at all. Call it hubris, call it failing to question one’s assumptions, or even call it stupidity: many companies make this mistake every day and it is costing them money.

The take-away: if you are a bank, say right there at the top of the page “We are a bank” if you have to. Sure, find the most elegant way to communicate who you are and whom you target. But, if you can’t decide between elegance and the obvious, error on the side of the obvious. These days, people have become jaded by clever slogans and marketing tactics. Especially on the Internet, attention spans are short. So, don’t beat around the bush: tell your visitors the “what” and the “whom” and you will have already won a battle that a whole slew of your competitors are losing every day in cyberspace.