Guide Design and content
How to write an About page that helps a buyer decide
By Studio Swing
An About page has one job: to answer "who am I about to trust with my money?" The visitor who reaches it is usually close to a decision and checking you out. Open with a plain statement of what you do and who you do it for. Then give evidence a stranger can check: how you work, who answers the phone, where you are, and what you will not do. Leave out the history of the company unless it explains why you are good at the job. Write it for the person deciding, not for yourself.
On this page
A visitor, a quote and a second tab
Say you run a small company that restores and installs timber windows for older houses. A homeowner has two quotes and yours is the higher one. Before calling anyone back, they open each company's site and click About. They are not looking for a story. They want to know whether you are a real business, whether you do this kind of work every week, and whether anyone will pick up when something goes wrong.
This company is hypothetical, and the moment is common. On many About pages the answer is a paragraph about "passion" and "a commitment to quality" that could sit on any site in any trade. The homeowner learns nothing, goes back to the quotes, and picks on price.
What do people look for on an About page?
Nielsen Norman Group studied this. Across three rounds of research they tested and reviewed 165 corporate sites, and in the latest round watched 20 working adults, among them financial analysts, realtors, city clerks and nurses, use About pages. They report that people looked for:
- a clear explanation of what the company does
- where it is located and how to contact it
- its mission and values
- its history
The things that frustrated them were stock photography, walls of text, jargon, hard-to-find information and aggressive sales language. When answers were slow to arrive, one participant said they would "just Google it." The report's firmest instruction is that, whether you have one About page or a whole About section, you must give a clear explanation of what the company does.
Two cautions about that research. It studied corporate websites of all sizes, including government agencies and nonprofits, so treat the list as the questions a visitor may bring, not a checklist every small business must satisfy in full. And "mission and values" and "history" appear because some visitors want them, not because they decide a purchase. For a buyer comparing two quotes, the first two items on the list carry most of the weight.
A separate Nielsen Norman Group piece on About summaries recommends brief summaries that stress a few impressive facts, concrete facts over marketing words, and a story that explains who you are and why you exist. It also warns against taglines that describe thousands of other companies equally well. That is a useful test for your own page, and we come back to it below.
What should an About page say, block by block?
Write the blocks in this order. Each one answers a question, and you can drop any block you cannot fill with something true.
1. What you do and for whom, in the first two sentences.
"We restore and install timber sash windows in houses built before 1940, in and around one named town."
A stranger should be able to repeat it. If your opening line would still be accurate with a competitor's name on it, it is not yet about you.
2. How you work.
The sequence a customer goes through: a visit, a written quote, a date, the work, a check at the end. Name the specific things you do that a careless firm skips, such as sending the quote in writing before you start, or cleaning up each day. This block does the work that a mission statement pretends to do, because it commits you to behavior a buyer can hold you to.
3. Who they will deal with.
A buyer is trusting people, not a logo. If you have a named owner or team, give the names and roles, with a real photograph. If you do not, say what a customer can expect: who answers the phone, who comes to the house, who they speak to if something goes wrong. A business with no famous founder loses nothing here. It only has to say who does the work and who is accountable.
4. Proof a stranger can check. Licenses, memberships, insurance, certifications, a physical address, a phone number that rings, a registered company number where your country publishes one. Each item is stronger when it can be verified: name the register or give the number, instead of showing a badge nobody can look up. Reviews and customer quotes belong here too, but only real ones, attributed the way the platform or the customer allows.
5. What you will not do, and who you are not for. This is the block most About pages lack, and it is the one that sounds least like marketing. "We do not take on jobs under a day's work." "We do not do flat roofs." A buyer who is not a fit leaves sooner, and a buyer who is a fit trusts the rest of the page more.
6. One next step. A phone number, a quote request, a booking link. The page has just made your case, so do not make the reader hunt for the door.
For where this page sits among the others, and why it usually deserves its own place in the main navigation, see planning your website's structure.
A weak paragraph and a stronger one
Here is the opening of our hypothetical window company's About page, before and after.
Before:
Founded on a passion for craftsmanship, we are dedicated to delivering exceptional quality and outstanding service to every customer. Our story began with a love of old buildings.
After:
We restore and install timber sash windows in houses built before 1940. Most weeks that means two or three houses, in and around one named town. A named joiner visits each house, writes the quote and checks the finished work. If a window sticks in the first year, call the number below and someone who was on the job will come back.
The second version is longer, but each sentence holds a fact a buyer can use or test. It also avoids numbers the company cannot stand behind. The "two or three houses" line is only a placeholder here, and on a real page each such figure must be true, current and something you would repeat on a phone call.
The word "exceptional" in the first version, by contrast, cannot be checked by anyone.
What should you leave out?
- Stock photos of smiling people. In the Nielsen Norman Group research, users reported frustration with stock photography and wanted authentic imagery. A plain photo of your real premises, vehicle or work beats a polished picture of strangers.
- Superlatives you cannot support. "The best," "leading" and "thousands of happy customers" invite the reader to look for the evidence, and then to notice it is absent.
- A history that does not explain your skill. Founding dates matter if they show experience, and then only if you state the experience plainly. A family story helps if it explains why you do the job the way you do. If it does not, cut it.
- Jargon and industry words your buyer would not use. The research flags both as reasons people lose patience.
- Anything you cannot show on request. A claim you could not back up if a customer asked is a liability on a page designed to build trust.
What if you have no team to show and nothing to boast about?
Then use what you have. A one-person business can write the page in the first person and name the person. A business that deliberately keeps individuals out of view can describe roles and responsibilities, and the process a customer goes through. A new business can lean on the blocks that need no track record: how you work, what you refuse, how to verify you, and what happens if something goes wrong. Do not invent a history to fill the space. A shorter page made of true statements reads as more trustworthy than a long one with padding.
Google makes a related point about content in general. Its guidance on helpful content asks whether it is self-evident to visitors who created the content, and encourages accurate authorship information where readers would expect it. An About page is where the "who" of the whole site is answered, so link to it from places where a visitor might ask.
Where should the page live, and how long should it be?
Put "About" in the main navigation or the footer, where visitors look for it. Nielsen Norman Group's research recommends an About Us link in the footer and explicit link labels over obscure terms. "About" or "About us" is understood by everyone; "Our story" or "Who we are" is fine.
Length follows content. Most small businesses can say everything above in 300 to 600 words with a few short headings, which is our own judgment from the blocks above, not a researched figure. If you have much more to say, such as long team biographies or a detailed history, put it on pages the About page links to, and keep the main page to a summary that stands alone. That is the structure Nielsen Norman Group describes: a short summary on the About page, with deeper pages beneath it.
What an About page will not do
It will not fix a weak offer, rescue a site whose service pages are vague, or replace reviews from real customers. It is also not the place for a sales pitch: the buyer arrives after the sales pages, and a hard sell at this point undoes the trust you are building. Trust, as Nielsen Norman Group puts it, "builds slowly as people use a site, get good results, and don't feel let down", so the page supports the rest of the site and does not carry it alone.
Checklist: your About page
- The first two sentences say what you do and for whom, in words a stranger can repeat.
- A competitor's name swapped into the opening would make it false.
- A section describes how you work, in the order the customer experiences it.
- It says who the customer deals with, with real names and photos if you use them.
- Each proof item can be checked: a register, a number, an address, a working phone line.
- A short list says what you do not do, or who you are not for.
- No stock photos, no unsupported superlatives, no jargon.
- Every figure on the page is true today, and someone owns updating it.
- One clear next step sits at the end, and the page is linked from the main navigation or footer.
Next steps
If you are deciding what else the site needs, the guide to planning your website content covers who writes what, and before you hire a web designer lists what to prepare. Once the About page exists, the next question is whether it is working: why a website is not bringing in enquiries shows where to look. Our own pages on how we work and on websites we plan and build are there if you want to see how we think about it. If you would like help, you can discuss your project; you do not need a technical brief to start.