Your website isn't about you
There's a woman named Sarah. I'm making her up, but she could be anyone. It's 10:47pm on a Tuesday. She's on her couch, laptop balanced on her knees, and she's been wedding-planning-adjacent for three weeks. Tonight, she's looking at florists.Wedding florists. She's already opened seventeen tabs when she lands on your homepage.
What does she see?
If you're like most of the florists whose sites I've quietly critiqued in my head over the years, she sees some version of this:
“We specialize in custom floral design for weddings, events, and everyday moments. From full-service wedding installations to elegant everyday arrangements, our team is passionate about creating beautiful florals that reflect your unique vision. Contact us to book a consultation.”
Which is a very nice paragraph. It's clear. It's professional. It says true things about what you do. It's also written for absolutely no one.
Because Sarah, at 10:47pm on Tuesday, on her seventeenth open tab, is not there to receive a summary of your services. She's there for something much more specific and much harder to name. She's there to figure out, in about eight seconds, whether you are the kind of florist she'd trust with her wedding. And she's not going to figure that out from a paragraph that could describe half the florists in her city.
To find what she's actually looking for, let’s watch Sarah's actual behavior.
Her eyes go to your imagery first: is the aesthetic even close to what she's been saving on her Pinterest board?
Then they goes to your language: do you sound like someone she'd want in her wedding-morning group chat, or like a corporate brochure?
Then they’re going to whatever gives her a sense of who else has worked with you, real weddings, real couples, real photographs of installations that feel like the kind of installation she wants.
She's asking one question, over and over, at every element on your homepage: do you get me?
And here's the thing. Your homepage can absolutely answer that question.
But not with the paragraph above. That paragraph is answering a different question, what do you do?
But that’s not the question, Sarah wasn't asking.
The version that could actually reach Sarah looks more like:
“We build weddings that feel like the couple, not the trend. Editorial-leaning, garden-loose, color-forward. For people who care more about how the room feels than how it photographs on a florist’s grid. ”
Notice what changed. It's not that this version is more clever.
It's that this version is answering the question Sarah is actually asking. It's telling her whether she's in the right place. It's making her feel seen before she's typed a single word into the inquiry form. That's the whole shift.
The pattern I keep noticing ….
I've been doing this work long enough to notice the same thing across almost every project I take on, regardless of niche.
The homepage that walks the client in the door. Maybe, the one the founder wrote themselves, or bought a template for, or hired someone to build without a strategy step - it is is almost always written around the founder. Their services. Their process. Their credentials. Their story. Their "we specialize in…"
None of these are wrong to have on a website. They belong.
But when they're doing the lead work, when they're the first thing a visitor encounters, they're speaking to a person who doesn't yet know why they should care.
And this isn't true just for florists.
It's also true for the therapist whose homepage says "compassionate therapy for anxiety, depression, and life transitions in the Seattle area" instead of speaking to Maria, who just Googled "is it normal to cry in the shower every day." Maria doesn't know if she has anxiety yet. She doesn't know if she needs therapy. She's not searching for a bullet list of modalities. She wants a homepage that seems to know what Tuesday-in-the-shower is like. It's the coach whose homepage is a resume of certifications, instead of speaking to someone who just quit their corporate job at 34 and doesn't know who they are anymore, and needs to feel like the coach on this site has met people like them before.
It's the author whose homepage leads with a bio, instead of speaking to a specific reader who's about to decide whether to buy the book.
The trouble is, once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.
Why is this so hard to actually fix
I want to be honest about something, because this is the part of the story where most website advice hand-waves. The reason founders design their websites around themselves isn't that they haven't been told about ideal client work. Every marketing consultant on the internet has told them. They've filled out ideal-customer worksheets. They've made avatar profiles. They probably have a document somewhere with words like "empathetic, health-conscious, values-driven women 30-45" on it.
The problem is that document doesn't help them write a homepage.
Because "empathetic, health-conscious, values-driven women 30-45" isn't a person. It's a category. And you can't design for a category, because a category doesn't scroll your site at 10:47pm on Tuesday.
A category doesn't feel seen. A category doesn't decide whether to fill out your inquiry form. Only a specific person does. And the reason founders can't easily get to that specific person is that they're too close to their own business to see it from the outside.
They know why they built this business. They know what makes them different from other service providers. They can list their credentials in their sleep. And all of that knowledge, genuinely valuable knowledge, pulls them toward writing outward, from themselves, instead of inward, from the visitor.
It's not that they're doing anything wrong. It's that the position they're writing from is the wrong position.
One honest suggestion
I'm not going to give you a worksheet. I don't think worksheets help with this. What actually helps is a shift in where you're standing when you sit down to write. Before you touch your website copy, before you plan a redesign, before you even think about your homepage, spend twenty quiet minutes describing one person, at one moment, landing on your site. Not a persona. Not a demographic. A specific person, at a specific moment, in the specific circumstances that brought them to Google in the first place.
Sarah. Tuesday, 10:47pm. On her couch, half-watching something on TV. Wedding-planning-adjacent for three weeks. Third florist site tonight. Tired of vague copy. Something specific she saw on Instagram brought her here. She has a preconception of what wedding florists sound like and it's mostly wrong.
Or Maria. Wednesday morning, at the bathroom sink. Googled something on her phone and now she's on your site. She's never talked to a therapist before. She's afraid this is silly. She's afraid it's not silly. She wants a homepage that makes both of those feelings feel normal.
Or David. Saturday afternoon. Just quit his job. His wife thinks he's on a walk but he's on your coaching site instead. He's forty-two. He doesn't know what he wants to do next but he knows he wants a coach who won't treat this like a business-plan problem.
Write your homepage for that person.
Every design decision, from the imagery you choose, the sentence that opens the page, to the decision regarding whether you lead with your credentials or with a moment of recognition, has an answer, when you're writing for a specific person at a specific moment.
The answer might be different than what you would have written. That's the whole point.
The last thing I want to leave you with …
If any of this feels obvious as you're reading it, good. Most of the best advice for founders is obvious. The problem isn't that we don't know it. The problem is that we can't easily do it for ourselves. You are, and always will be, too close to your own business to see it from the visitor's chair.
Which is why, when I get to work with a client who's ready for this reframe, my job is not really to design their website. My job is to help them see it with the eyes of the specific person they've been writing past.
Sometimes that person is one they already know deeply and had never named out loud. Sometimes it's a person they realize, mid-project, they'd been designing around a version of themselves.
Either way, the shift changes everything downstream. Your website is not about you. It's about the person who's about to land on it. Once you see that, you can't unsee it either.
If this landed and you'd like a set of fresh eyes on your own site, someone from the outside who can help you see it the way Sarah, or Maria, or David would, we'd love to talk. No hard sell. Just a conversation about who your website is actually for.
About me:
Hi, I'm Aneet, a website designer and co-founder of Brand Unpuzzled, based in Seattle, WA.I think in systems, but I design with feeling, a habit I picked up from years in tech, paired with a lifelong love of getting things right. When I'm not deep in a strategy or a line of code, you'll usually find me lost in a classic novel, or listening to music from decades before I was born (I might just be an old soul).
I love solving problems, through strategy, design, or code, and I especially love a 1:1 conversation that makes you lose track of time.
Say hi on Instagram @brandunpuzzled that's where I hang out most, especially in the DMs.
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