The home page never asks the reader to do anything: the only invitation is 4 viewports down

[bdelanghe]

Child of #205. Cold read of https://bounded.tools, 2026-09-03.

Flagging the epistemic status up front: this is a judgment about the page, not a measurement of readers. The numbers below are measured; the conclusion drawn from them is mine and worth arguing with.

What is measured

Home page, at 1440×900 and 390×844:

	desktop	phone
Page height	3,623 px	4,099 px
Page height, in viewports	4.0	4.9
Hero heading	213 px	199 px
Contact link (hello@bounded.tools)	3,377 px	3,777 px

The hero ends on this line:

That's the system. The rest of this page is what's built, how far along it is, and where to look next.

That is a table of contents, not an invitation. Below it, the first thing offered is a git clone block, and the only way to reach a person is the email address in the "Who" band at 93% of the page depth. On a phone that is roughly four and a half screens of scrolling before anyone is asked for anything.

Why I think it matters

The "Who" section states the goal plainly:

If your team is chewing on the same problem, I'd like to talk

The page is built to be read, and it is well built for that. It is not built to be answered. Every element between the hero and the footer explains; none of them asks. A reader who is convinced by the hero, which per #205 is the one sentence proven to transfer, has nothing to do about it for another 3,000 pixels.

This is distinct from the cognitive-load child already listed in #205. That one is about the prose being hard. This one is about a page that could be perfectly clear and still end without a next step. Shortening the copy does not move the contact link.

What I am not claiming

I have no evidence about what readers of this site actually do. There is no analytics on the page and I would not suggest adding any. So treat "readers bounce before the ask" as a hypothesis, not a finding. What is solid is only the geometry: the invitation is at the bottom, and there is no other one.

Suggested shape

Small and reversible, in rough order of confidence:

1. Put one action in the hero, next to the closing line. Most likely the contact, given the stated goal. Possibly /conformance, since that page is the strongest evidence the site has and is currently reachable from almost nowhere (Site nav renders on 2 of 8 pages, though nav.jsonld says it is "identical on every page" #268).
2. Repeat the contact once mid-page rather than only in "Who".
3. Reconsider whether git clone is the right first action. It asks for a terminal from a reader who has not yet been told why they would run it, and on a phone the URL wraps across three lines, so it cannot be copied cleanly anyway.

Worth deciding before or alongside the cognitive-load rewrite, since both touch the same copy.

Filed from a cold read, unclaimed and unassigned.