6 o’clock and the file has to go.
“Our expert team is committed to supporting you at every step of your journey. Get in touch today to begin.”
Maybe 15 seconds. It usually takes that long.
Openings are argued about. Someone senior always has a view on the first sentence and there is a meeting about it. By the time the page reaches its final paragraph everyone has stopped reading and the deadline has moved twice. There is also a brief that says the page must close on a clear call to action, so I type the clear call to action and hit send.
The line arrives and closes the file for her. She was deep in thought somewhere in a paragraph about what happens at a first appointment, working out what applied to her. The page then reaches over, shouts “THE READING IS FINISHED” and hands her the exact thought she is supposed to leave with. A red bow shaped like a ribbon is on it.
Ernest Hemingway wrote a story where a man and a woman sit at a station bar in Spain and argue about an operation. The operation is never named. She says she feels fine, and the story stops there, and people have been arguing about what they decided for a hundred years. That argument is the story’s afterlife. Hills Like White Elephants is what the story is called.
Same page with a different last line.
“First sessions run 50 minutes. Most people spend the first 10 deciding how much to say.”
She is not told what to make of that. She might see herself in it. She might close the tab and open it again in a fortnight, and the page has no say in that either way.
Somebody smart will point out that the page needs the appointment. The page can have the appointment. The button can say Book an appointment, in a box, in whatever colour they chose.
A button is not a sentence. Ending the prose on the instruction is what costs you, because an instruction is the easiest thing on a page to skip, and she has been skipping them all evening on every other site she opened before yours.
I wrote a closer like the first one this year. It is live somewhere. Somebody smart told me to write it.