Before you invest in about pages

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Before you spend anything on about pages, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• The about page is often the second most visited
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Common failure modes

Visitors are checking whether you are real. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

The short version

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about about pages before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The about page is often the second most visited — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.