The About page is the most-read page nobody wants to write. It is also the page most likely to be written by committee, which is why so many of them sound like they were assembled from the same box of parts: a mission statement, a founding story with a vague year, three values, and a stock photograph of a meeting.
Readers do not arrive at an About page looking for a mission statement. They arrive with one question: who is behind this, and can I trust them? Everything on the page should answer that question or get out of the way.
Start with the reader's question
Before writing a word, finish this sentence from the reader's point of view: "I came here because I want to know ______."
The answers are usually one of four things.
- Who is responsible for the content I am reading?
- What qualifies these people to give me advice?
- Is this a real organisation or a content farm?
- How do I contact a human being?
A good About page answers all four, in that order of priority. A great one does it without making the reader work.
The parts that earn their place
Most About pages need five sections, and most need nothing else.
A plain opening. Two or three sentences naming what the site or company does, for whom. No adjectives that could describe any business. "We publish guides about writing and editing, and we run a small set of free text tools" is a real sentence. "We are passionate about empowering communication" is not.
The person or people. Names, roles, and something specific about their background. A reader who sees a name and a history trusts the page more than one who sees "our team of experts."
How the work is made. This is the section most About pages skip and most readers want. How are articles researched? Who checks them? How often are they updated? What happens when something is wrong?
How the site is funded. If there is advertising, say so. If there is a product, say so. Ambiguity about money reads as evasion, and readers are better at detecting evasion than writers expect.
How to reach a person. An email address that a human reads. Not a form that disappears into a ticket system, unless the ticket system is also described.
Everything else — the founding story, the values, the office photographs — is optional. Keep it if it is specific and true. Cut it if it could be pasted onto another company's site without changing a word.
Write in the first person, then decide
The fastest way to make an About page sound human is to draft it in the first person, even if it will eventually be published as "we." First person forces you to name an actor: I write the guides, I check the sources, I answer the email. "We" can hide behind itself; "I" cannot.
Draft with "I," then convert to "we" only where the work is genuinely shared. Many small sites are better served by keeping the "I," because the honesty of a single named person is the trust signal the page is trying to produce.
Specifics are the whole trick
Compare these two paragraphs.
We care deeply about quality and accuracy. Our team works hard to ensure every article meets the highest standards.
Every guide is written by one editor, checked against at least two primary sources, and dated. When a reader reports an error, we correct the page and add a note at the bottom saying what changed.
The second paragraph is longer and much shorter to read, because every sentence contains something a reader can verify. Specifics do the work that adjectives pretend to do.
A useful test: for every claim on the page, ask "how would a reader check this?" If the answer is "they couldn't," the claim is decoration. Replace it with one they can check, or remove it.
Length
About pages are usually too long, not too short. A reader who has come to check whether a human is behind the site does not need eight hundred words about the founder's childhood. Two hundred to four hundred words covers most sites, and under two hundred is fine if the site is small and the contact details are clear.
The word counter is useful here mostly as a discipline: if the draft runs past five hundred words, ask what each paragraph is doing that the others are not.
The elements readers actually look for
Eye-tracking studies of About pages consistently find readers scanning for four things: a face or a name, a location, a contact method, and a date. They are checking whether the site is current and whether a person is behind it. Make these easy to find.
- A real name, ideally with a photograph and a link to more about that person.
- A place. "Based in Lisbon" is more reassuring than "global."
- An email address, written as text, not hidden behind an icon.
- A "last updated" line, if the page makes claims about the business.
These four items do more for trust than any amount of brand language, and they take ten minutes to add.
The revision pass
Write the draft, then run three passes over it.
Delete every sentence that could appear on another site. If it survives the transplant test, it is specific enough to keep.
Replace every abstract noun with a concrete one. "Solutions" becomes "the tools." "Excellence" becomes "we check every source." "Innovation" usually becomes nothing, which is a sign it was doing no work.
Read it aloud. An About page that cannot be read aloud without embarrassment is not finished. The embarrassment is the reader's experience arriving early.
Trust is not built by saying you are trustworthy. It is built by being specific enough that the reader can decide for themselves. That is the entire job of the page, and it is a writing problem before it is a design problem.