Give a page a job, a reader, and an order

An agent can produce a plausible homepage from a sentence such as 'bookkeeping for contractors.' That page will still be a guess. The guess gets smaller when you write three lines first. The job is the decision the page should help a visitor make. The reader is the person who has that decision. The order is the sequence of questions that person needs answered. Harbor Ledger, a fictional service, wants a contractor in Wellington to book a 20-minute call. Those three lines are the brief. A mood word is not a substitute for them.

Harbor Ledger's home page job is not 'explain bookkeeping.' A contractor who already has an accountant does not need a definition. The job is: help a contractor with messy invoices decide whether to book a call this week. That decision fails if the page never says who the service is for, what happens on the call, or what it costs to start. Write the job as a decision you could watch someone make. If you cannot imagine the visitor doing it, the job is still a topic.

The reader is an independent contractor who sends invoices and dreads tax time. The reader is not 'small businesses' and not a finance team with a controller. That tightness changes the page. A comparison of enterprise controls does not belong. A plain list of what to bring to the first call does. When you hand this to an agent, say which reader you are refusing. Otherwise the model will add sections for audiences you do not serve, because those sections are common on other sites.

For Harbor Ledger the order is: Is this for a contractor like me? What do you take off my plate each month? What does the first month cost? What happens on the call? Proof and process sit inside those questions, not in a separate block added because homepages usually have one. Write the questions down in the order a serious visitor would ask them. The agent can then choose a section only when it answers the next unanswered question.

The monthly price of $89 and the tax-year price of $640 are fictional facts inside this example. In a real brief they are publishable only when the business has approved them. A headline such as 'get your evenings back' is a proposal until someone approves it. A missing customer quote is a gap. Tell the agent to leave the gap empty or to use a clearly marked draft, and not to invent a contractor's name. Mixing a proposal into the fact list is how a hunch becomes a promise on the page.

A usable handoff is short. Job, reader, question order, approved prices, the call destination, and the sentence 'do not add testimonials.' Ask for one page, not a site map. After the draft, read the rendered page and check whether a contractor can answer the four questions without reading the agent's explanation. If the headline is clever and the price is missing, the brief did not survive the build. Fix the page against the three lines, not against a new mood.