Every site is the same site now. A hero with two lines and a CTA. Three cards under it explaining how the product is different. A scrolling logo bar of companies the founder once had coffee with. A pricing table with three columns. A testimonial in italics with a circular avatar. A footer with Product · Company · Resources · Legal. We have all seen this site. We are tired of it. We are also tired of complaining about it. So this is the last time we will.
The agency three-card is a stage direction, not a page.
The three-card pattern is a stage cue inherited from presentation software. The presenter says three things and the audience nods because three is the number that lets the speaker sit down. On a webpage there is no speaker and no audience and no chairs. The three cards are sitting on stage in front of an empty room. They are explaining the product to no one. Most of them say Fast, Beautiful, and Easy. They could be removed without consequence and nothing about the work would change.
We have not used three cards on the homepage. We do not have three cards anywhere on the site. If we did, the cards would not be cards. They would be a paragraph. The paragraph would say what the cards say without the cards.
The hero is a billboard. The pricing table is a menu. The testimonials are a focus group with their faces shown. None of these are editorial decisions. They are operations decisions.
The hero-features-pricing reflex.
The reflex is so embedded that the brief, when it arrives, is often written in its grammar — “hero section, then features, then pricing, then testimonials, then FAQ.” The brief is not wrong. It is a transcription of every site the brief writer has seen. The work is to write a different brief. The work is to notice that features is a word that lives only in software-marketing and never appears in a book, a poster, a catalogue, a record sleeve, a press release, a letter, a poem, or any other surface that has ever asked someone to look at it for more than four seconds.
The replacement is not seven cards instead of three and it is not a video. The replacement is a page that reads. Read pages have an opening. They have a body. They have a coda. They have asides set in a smaller scale. They have rules that separate the asides from the body. They have a folio. They are not flat. They have a hand.
A note on the alternative.
We are not the alternative. We are one alternative. The alternative we are has italic-serif display, hairline rules, a chapter rail, a running folio, a catalogue, a manifesto, a journal, and a cart. It has no three cards. It has no scrolling logo bar. It has no Get started. It has, on the way out, a colophon and a newsletter that admits it is a newsletter. The reader knows what they are reading. The reader knows when it ends.