"About Us"

I often get asked to write “About Us” pages for clients. It’s an essential page for most business websites; it’s where readers have an opportunity to connect with you by getting to know your history, values, purpose, and brand background.

But how do you write an “About Us” page that still follows the usability guideline of customer-benefit-oriented writing? How can you make your “About Us” page personal, meaningful and persuasive? And how can you avoid the mistakes that many “About Us” pages make: providing useless ego-centric information, using hyperbole like “greatest” and “ultimate”, writing “fluffy” words and phrases instead of facts, and wording their way around what the business really does and who they do it for?

An “About Us” page needs to be scannable, concise, plain-spoken, and preferably written in second person (“you”, “we”).

A good rule of thumb is to structure your “About Us” page in an inverted pyramid style – that means putting the most important information first and then leading into less important and more detailed information as you progress.

A great starting point for the inverted pyramid style on an “About Us” page is a clear and meaningful tagline. Take out the fluff and succinctly state what you do or what you provide, from a user benefit perspective. Being catchy is great, but being concise is most important.

Follow your tagline with one or two summary paragraphs that provide a bit more detail about your business’ products, services or goals.

From there you can spread out into more facts or elaboration on key information.

Jakob Nielsen, a web usability expert, even suggests adding subsidiary pages with more depth for readers who want to learn more about your organisation.

A well-written “About Us” page will build rapport and credibility with your readers. A clearly written “About Us” page will help your readers understand you, and your site, as a whole. If you keep it mind the basic web usability principles and structure your page in an inverted pyramid style, you will be well on your way to utilizing your "About Us" section to really connect with your customers.