What's the biggest mistake businesses make on their website hompage?

When I visit a website to check out its products/services, the first thing I look at is the homepage. The second thing I look at is the content on the homepage. And more often than not, I'm disappointed. This is not because of a poor site design. And its not even because of bad web content (although it's highly related).

The biggest mistake I see on the homepage of a lot of business websites: The content does not give the visitor a clear idea exactly what the business does.

This why I say it really doesn't have a lot to do with the actually writing. The content can be very well written, engaging and follow all the rules of good online writing. But all that is meaningless if the visitor has to dig deeper into your website just to find out the basics about your product/service.

These websites with vague homepage writing are often filled a lot of fancy marketing jargon and seemingly enticing claims as "The most revolutionary product/service on the market" or "Sophisticated and highly technologically advanced". Of course, these are just examples. However, I don't care how revolutionary the product is or how advanced it is. What is the product/service?

The most effective way to avoid this problem is to write your homepage content in clear, easy to understand English. Tell us what your product is and what it does, giving visitors a clear idea of your product on the homepage. Most visitors will move on to a different website if they don't understand something and will rarely dig deeper into your site. I include myself in that group of "short attention span" site visitors.

Summary: Write your homepage content for the layman who has never heard of you or your product/service before. If a layman can easily discover what your company does from quickly scanning your homepage, then your content is on track to attract and retain more visitors.