What does not belong on the homepage of a firm that wants its public sentences to stay checkable? This note makes a short refusal list, using the temptation to decorate a lesson about the SPY open with a promise as the example.
The homepage is a narrow page
A homepage is where a stranger decides what the firm is willing to say when there is almost no room. That scarcity is useful. It forces a choice between a mechanism and a boast. The mechanism can be stated in a sentence a later page can support. The boast needs a number, a comparison, or a status, none of which the educational standard can carry. So the boast does not get the scarce space. This is not an aesthetic preference for minimal pages. It is the same rule as the disclaimer, applied at the front door.
Several specific things stay off. A promised or historical result does not belong, because this public series does not state one. A figure for assets does not belong. A headcount does not belong. A speed figure does not belong, because the engineering notes refuse to let a bare number define the word fast. A regulatory status does not belong in a headline; if it is stated, it is stated in the legal pages and not improvised on the door. A portrait gallery of employees does not belong, because the work is described without protagonists and because personal data is not decoration.
The homepage may state a checkable method or point to a public mechanism. It may not state a result, an asset figure, a headcount, a speed figure, a status, or a promise wearing a market example.
Do not decorate the open
The SPY opening auction can be mentioned on a public site as a mechanism: a batch that is not the same thing as the continuous prints afterward. That mention belongs in a note more than it belongs in a banner, but the test is the same. The sentence becomes unfit for the homepage the moment it is paired with a promise that the firm trades that open well, a number about how quickly anything happens, or a chart that implies a result. The open is interesting without the decoration. The decoration is what would make the homepage a different genre from the notes.
Recruiting language is the usual source of the decoration. A campus slide wants a phrase that feels large. The homepage is then asked to host it so the slide does not look stricter than the firm. The influence should run the other way. The homepage is the strict document, and the slide has to survive it. New York, London, and Hong Kong can be named, because they are locations a visitor may need. They should not be illustrated with a claim about which office is elite. Internships can be named at the level of a boundary: a summer can ship a research tool, and live decisions stay with the firm. They should not be named as a pipeline with a yield.
Market examples on the homepage, if any appear, should already have survived this note’s list. A single sentence about a public mechanism is the most that fits. A montage of ticks, a reprinted tape, or a leaderboard of strategies does not. Data contracts are one reason. Taste is another. The deeper reason is that a stranger cannot audit a montage and can audit a sentence about an auction. The page should prefer the auditable object, as the note on describing the work already says.
Leave the door plain
What does not belong on the homepage is any sentence that the rest of the public site would have to disown: a result, an asset figure, a headcount, a speed figure, a borrowed status, a personal gallery, or a mechanism dressed up as a promise. The SPY open is the example of a mechanism that is allowed to stay a mechanism. The homepage does not improve it by adding a boast.
The refusal list is the culture at the front door. A later page can teach the auction, the basis, or the review standard in full. The door itself should not say more than those pages are willing to repeat.
This piece does not place a new sentence on the homepage and does not state a result, a speed, a status, or a headcount. It lists what should stay off that page, using the temptation to decorate the SPY open as the example.
