Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

The Welcome blurb.
The Welcome blurb is a terse description of the
site, displayed in a prominent block on the Home page, usually at the
top left or center of the content space so it’s the first thing that catches
your eye.

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The “Learn more.”
Innovative products and business models tend to
require a fair amount of explanation, often more than most people have
the patience for. But people have become accustomed to watching
short videos on their computers and mobile devices. As a result, people
have now come to expect a short explanatory video on most sites and
are often willing to watch them.
The point isn’t that everyone will use these three elements—or even that
everyone will notice them. Most users will probably try to guess what the
site is first from the overall content of the Home page. But if they can’t
guess, you want to have someplace on the page where they can go to find
out.
Here are a few guidelines for getting the message across:
Use as much space as necessary.
The temptation is to not want to use
any space because (a) you can’t imagine that anybody doesn’t know
what this site is, and (b) everyone’s clamoring to use the Home page
space for other purposes.
Take Kickstarter.com, for example. Because of their novel proposition,
Kickstarter has a lot of ’splainin’ to do, so they wisely use a lot of
Home page space to do it. Almost every element on the page helps
explain or reinforce what the site is about.

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Kickstarter may not have a tagline (unless it’s “Bring creativity to life”) but
they do put an admirable amount of effort into making sure people
understand what they do and how it works.
“What is Kickstarter?” is clearly the most prominent item in the primary
navigation.