About pages: what to get right first

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you only fix one thing about about pages this quarter, make it the first item below.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Start here

The about page is often the second most visited. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Then this

Visitors are checking whether you are real. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Eventually

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. 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.

The short version

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. 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

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.