What to put on your website, and how to write it

Ask an agent for a page and you get a page. You did that last lesson, in one instruction, and four of them came back. What stalls people is the question underneath. What actually goes on this thing, and how do I say it so it reads like mine rather than like every other site that went up this week.

You have done this work before. Deciding what something is for, checking what everyone else in the category leads with, cutting whatever does not serve it, then writing the proof. That is an ordinary quarter, and those four moves are the whole method here. The only thing that changed is that nobody is briefing you.

I run those moves on a site about a person, because that is the one anybody can build today without waiting on a client, a product, or permission. Build something else and the examples change while the moves do not. Nothing below depends on the site being about you.

What you are after is a decided site rather than a finished one.

Start with what the site is for

What should this site cause to happen?

Reaching for pages first is how you end up with a Blog that goes quiet and a Services page that never earned its spot. Answer the question and the page set falls out of the answer.

If the site should	It has to	Which usually means
Get you hired	Prove you can do the work	Work first, About second, and a CV people can take away
Win you clients	Make the offer legible and the next step obvious	One clear service, proof it worked, one way to start
Build an audience	Give someone a reason to come back	Writing, published often enough to be worth returning to

Pick one of the three rather than one and a half. A site quietly trying to do all three reads as a site with nothing to say, because every page is hedging against the other two jobs. The same trap catches a business site trying to be a brochure, a blog, and a shop at once.

Look at what your field already does

Competitive research is already your job.

Find two or three sites doing the job yours has to do. Not design galleries, which are useful later for how a site should look and useless for this. You want real sites that had to work. For a site about a person, that means people whose posts you read, good freelancers you have come across, or whoever came up last time you were hiring.

Two or three is enough, because the volume is the part you can hand off. You set the taste, naming the few worth learning from, and the agent widens the set from there.

Assignment: map what your field already does

Fill the brackets with your two or three sites, then send it.

Here are three websites doing the job I want mine to do: [site one], [site two], [site three]. Find me several more of the same kind, then go through the whole set. For each site, tell me what the homepage leads with in a single line, what pages exist and in what order, what proof they show, and what they ask a visitor to do. Then give me two lists: what nearly all of them do, and what none of them do. Do not tell me what to copy.

Done when you have both lists in front of you: what nearly all of them do, and what none of them do.

Open the ones it adds before you trust the summary, because an agent asked for examples will occasionally hand you a URL that does not exist.

What comes back should be a map of your field rather than a template to fill in. The first list tells you what a visitor expects to find, which is roughly the cost of entry. Something nobody in your category does is either a bad idea or the only room left to stand in, and working out which is the real work.

You should come out of this with your page set. Three or four pages covers most people, one of them usually a contact route. If yours differs from the four scaffolded last lesson, one instruction has the agent add, rename, or drop pages before anything gets filled.

What earns a spot on your site

Does this move someone toward the thing the site is for? If the honest answer is no, it comes off, however much work it was.

On a site about a person, a few things almost never survive that rule.

• A complete employment history, which is what a CV is for.

• Every project you have ever touched, rather than the three you would defend.

• Skill bars, which quantify something unquantifiable and invite arithmetic on your competence.

• A blog you have no plan to keep writing.

• A long account of how you got into the field, which rewards someone who already knows you and asks a lot of a stranger.

Fewer pages that are certain will beat more pages that are vague, every time.

Write an About page that positions you

Every site has one page where a stranger decides whether the thing is for them. On ours it is the About page, and it gets that decision in less time than it took to read this sentence.

Start with the move that makes the rest possible. April Dunford, whose positioning book is on a lot of our shelves, has said she never spent much time thinking about her personal brand. What she did instead was treat her consulting offerings like a product, and position them the way she would position anything she was launching.

So you are not positioning yourself, which is uncomfortable and tends to produce adjectives. You are positioning what you do, and that you already know how to do.

One honest note before the method. There is no validated framework for any of this. A systematic review of the personal branding literature in Frontiers in Psychology found no universally valid framework and called the field still in its infancy. Everything on offer, including what follows, is craft heuristic rather than method.

So, five questions, in this order. An hour is enough if the raw material is already in your head.

1. What do they do instead of hiring you? An agency, a full-time hire, someone cheaper, a tool, or nothing at all. This one determines the other four, and it is the easiest to skip.
2. What shelf do you want to be put on? The words someone uses when they recommend you to a colleague. It is a decision rather than a discovery, and it is the minute that pays for the rest of the hour.
3. What do you have that the other things on that shelf do not? Only things you can evidence.
4. So what? The consequence a buyer cares about, not the attribute.
5. Who cares most? The narrowest group you can describe who would pay for that specific consequence.

Then write it as a line rather than a statement. Philip Morgan publishes his positioning method free, aimed at independent consultants. The most useful part is a set of headline shapes:

One kill test before you commit. Put a peer’s name into your sentence. If it still reads true, you have written a description of your category, and the fix sits back at question two or three.

The rest of the About page is then short. Who you help, what changes for them, why you specifically, and what to do next. Your history goes in only where it is evidence for one of those.

Turn your work into case studies

Every site needs a proof section, and it is the one people most often abandon halfway. On a site about a person it takes the form of case studies. They stall for real reasons: the work sits under contract, it belongs to an employer, or the numbers are not yours to publish. Sometimes it was four people and you were one of them.

So, full disclosure before the method. The site you are reading this on has no case studies on it yet. There is a page about the work, and people willing to be quoted, and the detailed write-ups are still waiting on permission from the clients involved. If that is your queue too, it is the normal one.

The whole artifact first, invented for this lesson:

The shape is three moves you already know: what the situation was, what you did, what changed. Notice two things it does on top. It says which part was mine and which the team’s. Crediting the team reads senior rather than junior, and it survives any follow-up question. And every number carries its scaffolding: the baseline, the window, the scope.

Write around what you cannot say

Before working around a restriction, know which one you have hit. Most advice treats confidentiality as a single wall, and there are three, stopping different things.

Working out which wall is yours opens more room than expected. Being unable to publish a deck is not the same as being unable to say what you did.

For the client you cannot name, steal the strategy firms’ move whole. Bain writes about “ElectricCo” rather than about “a client.” The recipe is a constructed name, one line placing the company, and a standing note that names are changed and the results are real.

The pseudonym works because the story keeps a subject. “A leading fintech” cannot be the hero of a paragraph. ElectricCo can.

For the numbers, the rule comes first. Be precise about anything you can evidence, name the constraint where you cannot, and never be uniformly vague. Precision itself persuades: precisely stated offers out-perform round ones even in billion-dollar takeover bids. Rounding off a figure you are unsure of works against you.

Instead of	Say
“significant growth”	“more than 15% in the first year”
a number with nothing around it	the baseline and the window: “from 35% to 60% over two years”
an absolute you are not allowed to publish	a ratio: “worth roughly 2% of revenue”
a claim that sounds company-wide	the scope: “in the markets where we rolled it out”
nothing, because there is no number you can use	the decision you made and what changed

An unverifiable claim reads as invented in exactly two cases.

• Vagueness with no stated reason. Naming the constraint costs you nothing and reads as candor. Saying that a figure is non-public financial information you are not authorized to publish is a fact about your situation. “Significant growth” is a smell.
• Vagueness about everything at once. Stay vague about the client if you must, and be concrete about the rest: the constraint, the call, the tradeoff, which part was yours. None of that is confidential, and it is what an experienced reader weighs anyway.

If you cannot evidence a claim and you cannot name the constraint that stops you, cut it. An unsupported number carries less than no number at all, because it tells a reader that a result exists and that you chose not to stand behind it.

Assignment: write your first case study

Pick the one project you would defend, showable or not. The agent interviews you first, then drafts in the shape from this section.

Interview me about one project for a case study, one question at a time: the situation, what I specifically did versus the team, what changed, what I can evidence, and what I signed that limits what I can say. Then draft it in three short parts: the situation, what I did, what changed. Save it as a file in this folder. Use a constructed name if I cannot name the client, with a one-line note that names are changed and results are real. Mark every claim as evidenced, constrained, or cut, and where a number is not mine to publish, state the constraint instead.

Done when one case study sits in your folder and every claim in it is either evidenced or carries its named constraint.

Get your material into the folder

Your photos, logo, work samples, and links go into the project folder, next to your context file from the Build your marketing brain tutorial. If you skipped that tutorial, it is one sitting, and this lesson leans on it. The context file aims at the agent, standing instructions so it stops defaulting to generic marketing copy. What you have written today aims at a visitor, on a five-second budget. Same raw material, two outputs.

Then hand it over.

Assignment: fill the pages with your material

Put your photos, logo, and notes into the project folder first, then run this. The agent fills the pages from what it finds and marks what is missing.

Read my context file and the notes and images in this folder. Fill in the pages using my material only, and do not invent anything about me, my clients, or my results. Where something is missing, leave a clearly marked placeholder and list what you need from me. Keep the writing plain, keep my sentences where I have written them, and do not add testimonials, statistics, or claims I have not given you.

Done when every page has your words on it and a marked list tells you what is still missing.

Keep that last clause. An agent asked to write a convincing personal site will write one, metrics included, and those metrics will be invented.

What you get is a site with your words on it that does not look like much. The spacing will be off, the type will be whatever the agent reached for, and something on the Work page will be ugly. That is fine for now. Making a site look deliberate is a separate skill from deciding what it says, and it is what the next lesson does.