About pages for small teams

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Most advice about about pages assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

What to keep

The about page is often the second most visited. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions.

How we handle it

Photos of actual people outperform stock imagery. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

In practice

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. 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

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