The Website with the Nervous Smile
Jonas arrived before the city finished clearing its throat. I poured water from the familiar pitcher into two cups, and the small sound settled the room the way a tablecloth settles a table.
“My website looks polite,” he said, taking the cup, “but it’s terrified.”
“Websites often are,” I answered. “They’re asked to be brave on behalf of people who haven’t decided what they believe yet.”
He set his backpack down with the careful respect of a man carrying tools that still intimidated him.
“I rewrote the homepage three times this week,” Jonas said. “It now says nothing in four different fonts.”
The Borrowed Voice
We opened his laptop together. The screen glowed like a nervous relative at a reunion.
“Residential exterior solutions delivered with excellence,” he read aloud, wincing. “That sentence isn’t me. It’s a suit I rented.”
“Who does it sound like?” I asked.
“My competitors,” he admitted. “Or maybe a hotel brochure.”
I invited him to describe his work without looking at the screen. He spoke about rain finding its way through old shingles, about families worrying at night, about the relief on a homeowner’s face when a problem became a plan.
“That’s the real website,” I said. “The rest is wallpaper.”
Translation Instead of Performance
Jonas confessed he’d spent evenings scrolling other companies, collecting phrases like seashells.
“I thought marketing was imitation with better lighting,” he said.
“Marketing is translation,” I replied. “Your job is to move meaning from your hands into someone else’s day.”
We placed the laptop aside and used the whiteboard again, drawing a single line across the middle.
Above the line: What I do
Below the line: What it changes
He wrote slowly:
I repair roofs.
So people can stop worrying when it rains.
The room felt taller.
“That sentence has a heartbeat,” I said.
The Nervous Smile
He clicked back to the website as if approaching a shy animal.
“The photos are fine,” Jonas said. “But the words are grinning too hard.”
“Let them relax,” I told him. “Honesty doesn’t need dental work.”
We replaced one paragraph with two simple lines:
I show up when the weather doesn’t.
I explain the problem before the price.
Jonas leaned back.
“My dad would understand that page.”
“Then your clients will too.”
A Small Assignment
For the week ahead I gave him one task: rewrite only the first screen of the site as if speaking to a single homeowner he liked.
“No keywords,” I added. “No experts. Just you and one tired person at their kitchen table.”
“And if it’s imperfect?”
“Imperfect is how humans recognize each other.”
He nodded, sipping the last of the water as if courage were dissolved in it.
After the Hour
At the end of the session, I poured a final measure from the pitcher, and we drank to the strange business of telling the truth online.
“I thought marketing was about getting bigger,” Jonas said, setting the cup down.
“It’s about getting clearer.”
He packed the laptop like a less dangerous animal now.
At the door he paused. “Maybe my website doesn’t need a louder voice. Maybe it needs a steadier one.”
“That’s the same thing,” I answered.
The bell practiced its brief applause as he stepped into the street, where the buses were already writing their daily paragraphs.
I rinsed the cups, listening to the water remember its shape, and imagined Jonas at his desk teaching a screen how to speak like a human being.
A Gentle Next Step
If Jonas’s wrestling match with his website felt familiar, there’s a simple companion waiting in the DNA-DIY $4 eLibrary. The eBook Magnetic Messaging explores how to translate real work into real language, replacing borrowed phrases with words that fit your own voice.
You can find it at navigatetowealth.org/DIY