The real cost of ignoring about pages

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Nobody bills you for neglecting about pages. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• The about page is often the second most visited
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Visitors are checking whether you are real. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

A reasonable first step

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

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
• 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.