Peter's rule: make it beautiful, make the offer visible
In 1998 I met a man called Peter Toner, who ran a design and marketing agency called Loudhailer. He was producing work for the CBI, the NHS, BAKO, Addison. He was, without much competition, the sharpest marketing mind I have ever worked alongside, and he was operating about a decade ahead of everyone else.
I nearly did not meet him at all.
I had sent my portfolio in for a job, and Peter took one look and decided not to interview me. Not because the work was poor. Because it was good, and he did not believe it was mine. He was paying a heavyweight London designer a small fortune at the time, and what I had sent was in that territory, which to his mind meant a lad from Fleetwood had not done it.
His wife Dawn set him straight. Why, she asked, would anyone show up with work they could not actually produce for him?
I got the interview. I got the job. And I have thought about that exchange a lot over the years, because Peter was not being unreasonable. He was doing what anyone does with incomplete information: filling in the gap himself.
What was missing was not the quality. It was the story behind it. I had sent the work and nothing else. No word about how I actually did it, what I used, that I had been laying out brochures by hand since I was fifteen, that I had run a studio by nineteen. All of that would have made it obviously mine. I just had not thought to say it, because when you are close to your own work you assume it speaks for itself.
It does not. Work on its own is evidence without context, and people will supply their own context if you do not give them yours.
That is exactly what happens to your business on your website every single day, except there is no Dawn in the room to argue your corner.
Peter is sadly no longer with us. But his brief never changed, whatever the job was:
“Make it look beautiful, and make the offer visible, so it turns into new business.”
That is it. That is the whole thing. Nearly thirty years later I have not found anything that improves on it, and I have watched an entire industry spend a fortune failing to.
Most websites fail one half of it. Quite a lot fail both. So let us take the two halves in turn.
Half one: make it look beautiful
People bristle at this, especially the practical sort. Looks are surface. Substance is what matters. Judge me by the work.
Lovely idea, and completely at odds with how anyone actually behaves.
Somebody landing on your website has never met you. They cannot see your work, cannot gauge your character, cannot ask around. All they have is what is in front of them, and they will draw conclusions from it in about three seconds. That judgement is not about aesthetics. It is about competence.
A tired, cluttered, slightly broken website says: this person may be tired, cluttered and slightly broken too. That is not fair, but it is exactly what happens, and it happens to good businesses constantly. Five star reviews, twenty years on the tools, and a website that quietly loses them the booking.
Peter nearly passed on me because my portfolio arrived without its backstory, and he was one of the sharpest marketing men in the country. If he could reach the wrong conclusion from incomplete information, your customer on a phone in a rainy car park absolutely will.
Your website gets read as the truth about your business, whether it deserves to be or not.
What beautiful actually means here
Not fancy. Not animated. Not award-winning.
It means it looks like someone cared. Consistent typefaces, generous space, decent photographs of real work, nothing squashed or wonky on a phone. It loads before they get bored.
That is a lower bar than people fear, and a higher one than most local websites clear.
A cautionary tale about beauty on its own
Anyone who was around in the early 2000s will remember Flash.
For a few years, the best-looking sites on the web were built in it. Full-screen animation, sound, things that swooped and unfolded. Genuinely lovely work, and designers loved it because you could do anything. Clients loved it because it looked like the future.
There was one problem. Google could not read a word of it.
The whole site was one lump of animation as far as a search engine was concerned. No text to index, no pages to rank. Businesses paid a fortune for something that stopped visitors in their tracks, and then nobody ever arrived to be stopped. Beautiful, and invisible.
I have never forgotten it, because it is the neatest illustration there is of half a rule being no use at all. And the same thing is happening again right now with businesses whose sites look smart but say nothing an AI can understand. Different technology, identical mistake.
Beautiful gets you believed. It does not get you found.
Half two: make the offer visible
This is the half that gets skipped, and it is the half that pays.
By offer, Peter did not mean a discount. He meant the thing you want them to do, and the reason they would want to do it, put where they cannot miss it.
Most websites hide this. They open with a lovely photograph and the words “Welcome to our website.” Then a paragraph about being established in 1994 and being passionate about quality. Somewhere near the bottom, in grey text, a phone number.
That website has failed. Not because it is ugly, but because a stranger cannot tell within seconds what is on offer or what to do next.
What goes at the top
Three things, before anyone scrolls:
What you do, and where. Plainly. “Emergency plumber, Poulton and the Fylde coast.” Not “your trusted partner in property solutions.”
Why you and not the other lot. One line. Same day call-outs. Twenty years on the tools. No call-out charge. Whatever is actually true and actually matters to them.
What to do next, impossible to miss. A phone number they can tap. A button that says what happens when they press it. Right there, where their thumb already is.
If a stranger cannot answer what is this, is it for me, and what do I do now in five seconds, the offer is not visible. It does not matter how nice the photograph is.
The bit in the middle: sounding like yourself
Here is where I would add a little to Peter’s rule, because the web has introduced a failure he never had to deal with.
Businesses write like a brochure because they think that is what professional sounds like. So a bloke who is funny, blunt and brilliant on the phone becomes, in print, “a leading provider of integrated solutions committed to excellence.”
Nobody talks like that. Nobody trusts it either. And crucially, it says nothing: strip the trade name out and it could be any firm in the country.
The test
Read your homepage out loud. If you would be embarrassed to say it to someone in the pub, do not put it on your website.
Write how you would explain the job to a neighbour. “We do bathrooms. Usually takes a week. We clean up after ourselves, which sounds obvious until you have had someone who does not.”
That is better copy than anything with the word “bespoke” in it. It sounds like a person, and people buy from people.
And the backstory is part of it
Remember Peter nearly passing on me because I sent work with no story attached. Most business websites make the same mistake.
They show the outcome and skip everything that makes it believable. How long you have been doing it. How you actually work. What you use, what you refuse to do, what you fix that others leave. That is not padding, it is the context that turns “nice photos” into “this person knows what they are doing.”
You do not need an essay. A line or two in the right place does it. “Twenty two years on the tools.” “We tidy up properly, which sounds obvious until you have had someone who does not.” “I answer the phone myself.”
Small, specific, true. That is what stops a stranger filling in the gaps with their own assumptions, and it is exactly what AI needs to describe you accurately to someone else.
And it matters more than it used to
There is a second reason now. AI reads your website to decide whether to recommend you. Plain, specific, factual sentences are exactly what it can understand and repeat. Marketing waffle gives it nothing to work with, so it recommends the business that wrote things down properly.
Peter’s rule, accidentally future-proofed. Clear offers were always better for humans. Turns out they are better for machines too.
Where offers actually go wrong
Two mistakes I see constantly.
The offer that is buried. You do have something good, a free quote, no call-out charge, a guarantee, but it is mentioned once, halfway down a page nobody reaches. If it is worth offering, it goes at the top and it gets repeated.
The offer that is really a discount habit. Ten percent off, permanently, on everything. That is not an offer, it is your price with extra steps, and people work that out quickly. Worse, it teaches them your prices are soft.
A good offer removes a reason not to contact you. Free quote removes the fear of being charged for a chat. No call-out fee removes the fear of paying for nothing. A guarantee removes the fear of being stuck with bad work. That is the job: not to be cheaper, but to make it easier to say yes.
Thirty years, one sentence
I have been through Letraset and spray mount, PageMaker, the first websites, Flash sites that dazzled and ranked for nothing, two brutal Google updates, and now AI deciding who gets recommended. Almost every technique I learned along the way has been replaced at least once.
Peter’s rule has not.
Make it look beautiful, so people believe you are competent. Make the offer visible, so they know what to do. Sound like yourself, so they believe there is a person behind it.
Everything else is detail.
Want to know whether your site passes Peter’s rule? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself.