Last time, I figured out what my website is for. A digital business card, one job: be the thing someone finds after we meet, and point them onward.
Knowing the job was the easy part. This week was harder. Because now I had to decide what the site actually says. The one thing I want someone to walk away thinking.
And I wanted it to say everything.
My first draft was a pile
Here’s what I wanted on there: strategy-first web designer. Minimalist. 25 years in tech. Builds sites that get results. Open-source guy. Bilingual. Good taste. Calm under pressure. Father.
All true. All things I’m a little proud of. So onto the list they went.
Then I read it back and felt nothing. It wasn’t a message. It was a résumé wearing a trench coat.
You can’t remember a list
Think about the last business card you were handed. You don’t remember the five things it said. If you remember anything, you remember one thing, or nothing at all.
That’s how it works for a website too. Pile on five messages and a visitor doesn’t absorb five. They absorb zero. Too many choices just leads to overload and paralysis, and they don’t know which one you actually wanted them to keep in their brain. Five messages isn’t five times the impact. It’s just noise.
If I wanted to be remembered for one thing, I had to pick one thing. Which meant cutting the other eight.
Cutting hurt, then it didn’t
Dropping “25 years in tech” felt wrong. I earned that. Same with bilingual, open-source, all of it. Every cut felt like hiding something good.
But here’s what I noticed: the second I let them go, the one that mattered got louder. Underneath everything on that list was the same idea, the thing I actually believe. In a world full of noise, I make things clear. I remove what doesn’t matter so what does can finally be seen.
That’s not nine messages. That’s one. Less noise. More clarity.
I didn’t delete the other eight. They’re still there. They just stopped fighting to be the headline and started backing it up.
Try it on yourself
Look at your website, your bio, your homepage. Count the messages. If there are five, you have none.
Then do the hard thing: pick one. Not because the others aren’t true. Because the one is the only one they’ll remember. Everything else can stay as quiet support underneath it.
It’s uncomfortable. It feels like leaving money on the table. It’s the opposite. It’s the whole game.
Next up: I finally know what the site is for, and what it says. Time to figure out what it looks like. And that’s where “I want it to feel futuristic” runs straight into “people need to get it in ten seconds.” That fight is the next post.
This is how I work at Minimo Studio: strategy first, design later. Doing it on myself, in public.
Less noise. More clarity.
