Three myths about about pages

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few things about about pages that get repeated more often than they get checked.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

“It only matters for big sites”

The about page is often the second most visited. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

“Our platform handles it”

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

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
• Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.