About Pages

Your About Page Is a Robot caught my attention especially since I’ve been reviewing over 100 sites in a specific industry. Some don’t have About pages, some had them — but they were not helpful, and a select few succeeded.

The About page also gives your company a human touch. What your About page should contain depends on the size of your site and company, as well as the nature of your company. These sites I reviewed didn’t need anything elaborate.

Many companies use corporate-speak when writing about their business in the About page. A yawner. When I simply want to know is what the company does — the answer comes in a long, fancy babble. No time for that or translating it into English.

Too many sites take the hard way in writing the About page. It’s OK to shoot for simple. Suggestions of what to consider adding in an About page especially small businesses:

• What the company does
• Bios
• Photos
• Contact information (yes, even if you have a separate contact page) and more than one way to contact
• Site information
• Basic info
• Appropriate call to action

The article explains a glaring problem with About pages.

Ms. Patience: For starters, I need to know what you do.

Dumb-bot: The Knock-Doodle Corporation is a global services and solutions provider.

Ms. Patience: All right…But what, exactly, do you do?

That’s the kind of stuff we run into. I looked at a potential client’s Web site to get a feel for what it does to determine what content is needed. What should’ve taken a minute took minutes to find out the answer to “What do you do?” A lot of the content sounded like Knock-Doodle Corporation’s response — just multiply by ten.

Ask a friend who doesn’t know your business to read the content and see how much she grasps.