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All About You: Your Website Bio

One “no-brainer” page on your website will generally be an “About” page. Here are some tips to make it work for you and your business.

Purpose

Your “About” page is essentially a short biography of the organization and/or the individuals that make it up. You want this information to be interesting, relevant, and possibly impressive to visitors to your site. This is a good place to trot out your various credibility factors – how long you have been in business, special education, certifications, honors, awards, and previous work experience that make you qualified for the work you are doing now.

If someone comes to this page on your site they are generally interested in one of the following:

What the heck your business offers – Ouch! This means you haven’t done very well on your homepage explaining what your company does and the benefits you provide. Or perhaps you are missing some key pages such as products and services pages, or a “what we do” type page.

Whether they should trust you – This is why credibility factors will help. If someone is reading about you to determine whether to do business with you, they are concerned with issues of qualification – have you been in business long? Have you done this sort of work for a long time? Are you certified to do this work (if that is common in your industry)?

Who is in your company – If your company is larger than a sole-proprietorship, you might have several distinguished professionals, and they should be listed with their own bios and, ideally, headshots.

Company with Several Staff

If your business has employees, your “About” page will generally be about the company as an organization – when it was founded, by whom, where the headquarters is located, mission and vision, etc.

If you are the principle of your organization, you should have your own bio page as well. This could be a sub-page below “About Us”, along the lines of “About Our Founder” or, just use your name.

If you have a partner, or several high-level staff people with potentially impressive bios, each of them can have their own bio as well.

Especially if your business is service-oriented, you should have bios of the key staff, since the people are the product.

Sole-Proprietor Business

If you are a sole-proprietor providing personalized services, the About page will mostly be about you. I generally recommend that you write this page in the third-person, even if the rest of the website is written in first- or second-person. It appears more formal, plus, if can be ready to use when you need to provide a bio for a speaking event or article resource box.

Web Action Steps

  • Determine your About Page strategy – how many bios do you need? What sort of company-wide information should you share?
  • Draft the bio(s) to be brief and relevant – remember you can leave out things that are irrelevant to your current business, such as unrelated jobs held years ago in unrelated industries.
  • List your related honors, awards, degrees, and certifications. If you have a lot, just list the most important or impressive.
  • If you have other pages in the site that go into more depth on related issues, link to them here. For instance, an interview, mission statement, etc.
  • Make sure your About page doesn’t have to do too much heavy lifting – be sure you have all the appropriate pages in your site to fully convey what products and services you offer and the benefits of doing business with you.

Having an interesting and relevant About page can help position your business as the professional establishment it is. If you need an entire website that will help you do that, please take a look at my website development services.