Your Website Is a Thirty-Second Story

Pull up the websites of five plumbers in your town and try to tell them apart. You'll probably get the same page five times, with a list of services, a strip of badges, a phone number in a big orange button, and a stock photo of a guy in a clean polo smiling at a pipe. Landscapers and med spas do it too, and family law offices do it with a gavel. Nobody remembers any of them. There's a better way to build your site, and it borrows from the thirty-second commercial.

Every Site Answers the Wrong Question

Licensed, bonded, and insured. Every plumber says it, and every customer already assumes it, the same way they assume the plumber owns a wrench. Credentials matter. They just don't make anyone feel anything. The services list is worse. It's a menu for people who already know what to order, and most visitors don't. They know something's wrong, but they couldn't tell you what it's called.

So, the owner hands over a list of nouns, the freelancer lays them out in a tidy grid, and the visitor leaves for four other grids in a different blue. We've all been that visitor. That's why the sites all look alike. Everyone's describing the business, and nobody's talking about the customer's basement, which is the reason they showed up.

The Customer Is the Character

Film school at USC gave me the engine under every story. Somebody wants something badly, and something stands in the way. I've written that a brand is a character. For a plumber, I'd flip that. On your site, the business isn't the character. Your customer is. They want a dry basement, a yard they don't apologize for, to stop feeling tired by two in the afternoon, or a custody schedule their kids can actually live with.

Something's in the way of every one of those. Water comes in every time it rains, and nobody can say if it's the sump pump or the foundation. The weekend disappears into a yard that never looks finished. Sleep, vitamins, and a third coffee haven't touched the tired. The business is how they get past it, so the business shows up second on the page.

Open on the Want

Think back to Volkswagen's The Force. A kid in a full Darth Vader costume tries to move things around the house with his mind, the dog and a sandwich included. Nothing budges. Then his dad pulls into the driveway in the new Passat, and the kid runs outside to give it everything he's got. And the engine starts. Dad's in the kitchen with the remote. Most of the spot is about what the boy wants, and the Passat only matters once he's got something to point at.

It's no different for a landscaper. Your homepage gets about as long as a commercial to do the same job, so open on the want. Not "Full-Service Landscape Design," but the homeowner who parks down the block so nobody connects them to that yard. If you build sites for other people, ask the owner one question. What does their customer want badly enough to search for at eleven at night? They'll know. That answer goes at the top of the homepage, in the customer's words.

Name What's in the Way

What's a want with nothing in the way? A wish list. In Russian Doll, Nadia keeps dying and snapping back to the same bathroom mirror at her own birthday party. The loop is the obstacle, and the tension it builds is why we keep hitting next episode. A med spa customer lives a quieter version of it, seeing the same tired face in the mirror every morning.

Family law is heavier. Chances are the parent reading that site is scared, mostly of what they can't see coming. What they're looking for is proof that somebody understands what's in the way, whether it's a process they've never been through, a timeline nobody will commit to, or an ex who knows which buttons to push. Name that plainly, on the first screen, and your phone number finally has a reason to get dialed.

Let the Business Walk On Second

Now that you've got the want and the obstacle, the business can walk on. The services, the license number, the twenty years, and the reviews still belong on the site, they just come after the want instead of before it. As Lee Clow has said, advertising that's done well ends up part of our culture instead of pollution. I met him early in my time as a Creative Director at Chiat\Day. A plumber's homepage isn't going to become culture. But it can stop adding to the pollution, which mostly means rewriting the top of the homepage.

Build It in Thirty Seconds

A TV spot gets thirty seconds to make you care about somebody. Your site gets about that long before the visitor hits back and tries the next plumber. Picture one of those five plumbers putting a dry basement at the top of the homepage. That's the site people would remember. It won't look like the other four, because it's about the person reading it. Thirty seconds is enough. Go build it.

Steven Townsend is the co-founder of Scowty and a creative consultant living in Los Angeles, with experience at agencies including 72andSunny, Saatchi & Saatchi, and TBWA\Chiat\Day. He's written Super Bowl spots and an Emmy-nominated series, and integrates AI tools like Claude, Midjourney, and Runway into creative workflows for brands including The North Face, Toyota, Genesis, and DoorDash.