IN THIS ARTICLE · 7 PARTS
The About page is often one of the most visited pages on a small business website. People go there when they are interested but not yet sure. They want to know who you are and whether they can trust you. Here is how to write it.
Make it about the customer, too
An About page is not your biography. It answers the customer's unspoken question: "Why should I choose you?" Every part of it should help answer that. Nielsen Norman Group, one of the best-known user research firms, lists openly sharing who you are, how to reach you and what you charge among the four factors that make a website trustworthy [1].
A simple structure that works
- One sentence about what you do and for whom. "We are a family renovation company in Sofia, focused on bathrooms and kitchens."
- Your story, briefly. How and why you started, in a few lines. Real details are more interesting than big words.
- The people. Photos and names of the team, with what each person does.
- What makes you different. Experience, a guarantee, how you work, what you never do.
- Proof. Years in business, number of finished jobs, reviews, certificates, well-known clients.
- A next step. A clear button to call, write or see your work.
Show real people
Customers buy from people. A photo of the owner and the team, taken in your real workplace, builds more trust than any text. See what photos to use on your website. Research by Nielsen Norman Group shows that people ignore generic stock photos but look closely at photos of real people who actually work at the company [2].
Write like you talk
Avoid phrases like "we are a dynamic, customer-oriented team of professionals". Everyone says that. Say what you actually do and how you do it. More in how to write the texts for your website. Most visitors scan a page rather than read it word by word, so short, plain sentences work best [3].
What to leave out
- long histories nobody reads
- generic values without examples
- stock photos of strangers
- a page that ends without telling the visitor what to do next
A good About page makes a stranger feel they already know you a little, and makes the next step easy.
Link it to your work
Link from your About page to your best projects or case studies, and to your services. Visitors who are ready to trust you want to see proof next: why separate case study pages help SEO. If you want help writing it, that is part of how we build a site: see our process.
References
- Nielsen Norman Group. "Trustworthiness in Web Design: 4 Credibility Factors." nngroup.com
- Nielsen Norman Group. "Photos as Web Content." nngroup.com
- Nielsen Norman Group. "How Users Read on the Web." nngroup.com
