What to ask your agency about about pages

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on about pages, these questions are worth asking early.

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.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

The about page is often the second most visited. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Visitors are checking whether you are real — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.