About pages: a practical guide

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. This guide covers what about pages actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

Why this earns attention

The about page is often the second most visited. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens.

The practical version

Visitors are checking whether you are real. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• The about page is often the second most visited
• Visitors are checking whether you are real
• Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

Common failure modes

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

Turning this into a decision

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.