How to write an About Page for your website
Along with FAQ and Contact pages, the About Us page is one of the first supporting pages you’ll likely create for your website, regardless of the industry you’re in.
They may go by different labels—“About”, “Story”, “Mission”—but these types of pages generally serve the same key purpose: to be the go-to page for a brand to say, “This is who we are.”
When a visitor wants to learn more about you or your business, it’s the page they’ll look for.
Unfortunately, About Us pages are too often treated as an obligation rather than the valuable opportunity they are to connect with your customers by selling your story, your vision, your mission, and what makes you, YOU.
What an About Us page is really for
The problem with many About Us pages is they’re an afterthought—a link buried in the footer of a website that leads to a few hastily written paragraphs about a company.
What an About Us page should be is a goal-oriented sales page, one that focuses on highlighting the biggest selling points of your story and brand, making a strong impression on curious customers.
If anyone wants to quickly understand your brand, your About Us page should be the single link you send them.
In contrast to a landing page, your About Us page is the ideal place to accommodate a number of objectives:
- Communicate the story of your business and why you started it.
- Describe the customers or the cause that your business serves.
- Explain your business model or how your products are made.
- Put a face to your business, featuring the founders or the people on your team.
- Incorporate persuasive content (e.g. an explainer video, data visualizations, links to blog posts) that might otherwise clutter your homepage.
In short, your About Us page is a home for your founding story, a place to show off your business wins, and a sales page that answers the most pressing question new customers have about your business outside why they should buy its products:
Why should they buy from you?
How to write an About Us page: A template
The best About Us pages accomplish their goals by telling a story about a brand.
Every story needs a protagonist, and so does every About Us page. In some cases, that might be you or your founding team. In others, you might treat your business as its own character with a distinct story.
Either way, stories are all about representing change—starting in one place and ending up in another—which is something your About Us page should also do as visitors scroll through it.
You can craft a narrative for your About Us page by using the following formula:
- Who you are
- What you sell
- Why you do it
Hit these points and you should have the structure for a story (not necessarily the copy you’ll use) that you can incorporate into your About Us page narrative.
However, a story is just the start. A good About Us page doesn’t just tell the story behind a company—it shows it.
Here are some other components you might want to incorporate into your About Us page to not only flesh out your narrative but to define your brand and communicate your company’s reason for being to customers.
Elements you can include in your About Us page design
Your business model
For some companies, their business model is their unique value proposition and can be a selling point that’s worth including on their About Us page.
Some examples of this might include:
- How you pass the savings onto customers.
- Where you source the materials for your product (e.g. manufacturing in a specific country or by providing jobs to a certain community).
- A breakdown of the portion of your revenue that goes to a charity.
If transparency might strengthen your brand, your About Us page is a good opportunity to summarize your supply chain, how your business works, and relate that back to the mission that drives you.
This is often accomplished with an illustration that presents your business model in an easy-to-digest manner, like this one used by Taaluma Totes that explains how they source materials for their products and how donations help support the country of origin.
Source: Taaluma Totes
Press mentions, testimonials, awards
Reviews, press mentions, or user-generated content can be included on your About Us page to share how you’re impacting your customers or your industry.
There are a variety of ways to integrate social proof into your About Us page, from embedding Instagram galleries of customer content to featuring the logos of publications that have covered you to highlighting a quote you lifted from a customer review.
Press mentions, awards, and other wins are common examples of milestones that can be used to help tell the middle of your story.
An introduction to your team
Putting a face to your brand helps to humanize it, communicate your company culture, and shine a light on the people who power your business.
Even if you only highlight the founders, your About Us page can be a chance to build your personal brand and share how your story and experience makes you and your company a good fit to serve your market.
Source: Death Wish Coffee
A video or gallery of photos
If you can, you should mix up the media on your About Us page to add variety and break up the text in your page design.
At the very least, you can include high quality behind-the-scenes photos that pull back the curtain and give visitors a glimpse into your business. Or, if you’ve invested in a video that helps visitors get to know you, your story, or your products, your About Us page is a good home for it as well.
Links and calls to action
Your About Us page can also be used to funnel visitors to other parts of your website or online presence, whether it’s a blog post or social profile.
Be sure to incorporate any relevant links into your copy and think about how you can continue the visitor’s journey by encouraging them to:
- Follow your social accounts
- Opt into your email list
- Check out your products
- Apply for a job at your company
- Read your blog
