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I agree; we need to help communities communicate clearly about their norms, particularly to newcomers.  Each community has a "FAQ" or "introduction" topic in the help that moderators can edit, and moderators can create other help topics.  Electrical Engineering has built out a body of site-specific help, for example.

But help isn't necessarily visible.  New users are invited to take a tour, which is the same on all communities, but perhaps we can have that end with some moderator-editable next steps or help links.  And perhaps every anonymous visit (that is, not from a signed-in user) should offer a "welcome" message with a link.  One of our design goals is contextual guidance; when you're trying to do a thing, that's the place to see help about doing that thing.  We should apply that principle to the site as a whole and offer some sort of contextual guidance to visitors -- ideally positive, more "please do X" and less "we forbid Y", to draw people in.

These are just rough ideas; we have aspirations, but none of this is designed or built yet.  If you (anybody) have ideas about how/where to provide this information, please post on Meta (either answers here or separate feature proposals, depending on what works better for whatever you have in mind).  Thanks!