Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content: All About Your About Page

As important as good website design is, let’s face it, it’s not what brings visitors to your site. They come for the content, and if that content is sufficiently compelling, then they’ll take the action you desire, whether that’s making a purchase, completing a registration form or even just picking up the phone to contact you for more information. In short, the success of your website begins and ends with quality content.

That’s why in this series of articles – Insider Secrets to Killer Website Content – we’re taking a look at types of content that are common to many websites and exploring ways that they can be redesigned and improved. This second installment addresses a ubiquitous website presence – the “About Us” page.

The ever-present, often-overlooked “About Us” page

You would be hard pressed to find a website that does not have an “About Us” page of some sort. It may be called “Our Company”, “Who We Are” or some other variation on this theme, but in the end, these are all pages focused on telling the visitor about the company to whom the website belongs.

The problem is that these pages are typically as boring as they are commonplace. They generally contain little more than some basic facts about the company – perhaps an abbreviated history of the organization, some details about what the company does or a mission statement.

This information may be necessary – after all, it is your company’s website, so it should contain some high-level, general information about your company. Still, your site – and your “About Us” page – can also contain more than just the facts, ma’am.

A lack of depth

The chief problem with the typical “About Us” page is not that the information it contains is bad in and of itself; it’s that it lacks the depth necessary to play a role in advancing your visitors toward conversion.

Compounding this problem is that “About Us” pages, once written, are rarely ever rewritten. During a redesign process, a website’s content is audited and overhauled, but  if the basic facts about the company haven’t changed significantly, the content of the “About Us” page is usually just moved over to the new site with little to no change made at all. As a result, factually accurate but somewhat boring “About Us” content often persists stubbornly through redesign after redesign.

Your company’s history and the services it offers are certainly important information to share, but there’s so much more that truly defines your company, including its unique personality.

Bringing personality into play

Neither the factual history of your company nor your self-proclaimed statement that you “provide outstanding customer service” will set you apart from your competitors, all of whom are saying exactly the same thing, likely in almost exactly the same words. However, what will set you apart is personality.

Every company has a personality. It is the unique product of your people, your company culture and your interactions with your customers. I often find that a company’s personality is energetic and fun when they engage with customers in the offline world, but their online presence captures none of this energy. Instead, the only cards they show are the typical vanilla facts about the company itself. This is what we can change by bringing that offline personality and the particulars of how your company engages in the physical world into the digital space.

Examples of personality

Let’s take a look at a few great examples of websites that are infused through and through with personality all the way down to the “About Us” page, starting with e-tail giant Zappos.com.

Zappos’ “About” page is all about the company’s culture. Yes, the history of the company and their leadership team are there as well, but the main focus of this section is their culture, including images of holiday celebrations and videos of their people. In perusing this content, you get a much better sense of who they are than you would by reading a a mission statement, a brief company history and a bulleted list of achievements and awards.

Another example of a website permeated with personality is Northfield Savings Bank. The sense of fun that they’ve built into their brand is an unexpected but delightful surprise, since banking isn’t generally synonymous with fun. Still, Northfield pulls it off on their website. Starting with the logo, which features a flying pig, they carry this theme through their entire site, turning the popular phrase “when pigs fly” into a rallying cry for how they go above and beyond in serving their customers. These stories are told on a subpage of their “About” section as part of their “Pig Stories” video series.

It’s not all fun and games

Personality doesn’t have to be all about fun, holiday costumes or flying pigs. For many brands, fun would be an inappropriate trait – but that doesn’t mean you can’t display a personality.

Perhaps you are a not‐for‐profit organization that provides assistance to those in need in your community. Fun may not fit into your brand, but passion likely will. You can show that passion by using your “About Us” page or section to detail the impact your organization has had, profile the lives it has touched and convey the drive that you have to continue to do more.

Instead of simple facts and figures, personality will provide a well‐rounded, distinctive look at who your company or organization really is. That will be what sets you apart from your online competitors and their typical, boring “About Us” pages.

The more the merrier: Adding team bios

If adding unique personality to your company’s “About Us” page can help differentiate your organization, then adding individual bio pages for your employees can take this to the next level.

Granted, this approach is not a fit for everyone. A massive organization with thousands of employees obviously cannot have a page on their website for every individual. In these cases, the bio pages may be limited to board members or senior-level executives. For smaller organizations, however, it is certainly possible to feature each team member individually, and there is real benefit in doing so.

About a year ago, my company redesigned our website. During this process, we made the decision to include a section for “Our People” and give every employee a bio page of their own. We also decided to allow the unique personalities of those individual employees to shine through on their pages. Rather than using the professional headshots you would find on LinkedIn or in press releases, we encouraged our employees to submit photos of themselves that showed them outside the office environment. We received snaps of our team members atop mountains and glaciers, competing in races of one kind or another, enjoying vacations, feeding animals or just being silly and having fun. Taken as a whole, the photos show the variety of personalities and passions that make up our team.

For the bios, we included a short professional history, but we also asked our staff to share their hobbies, talents and an interesting or unusual story about themselves. Like the photos that accompany these bios, the stories and profiles we created reveal an incredible sense of diversity amongst our team.

What our customers are saying

Adding these individual bio pages on our website was a leap of faith for us. We were unsure how our clients and prospective clients would respond to this type of content. However, I am happy to report that our fears were unfounded, as the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

A number of our existing clients have remarked how they enjoy being able to see a picture of a team member before they are scheduled to speak or meet with that person. They also like to know a little something about them outside of their professional work. In more than one case, a customer and one of our team members have discovered shared hobbies or interests thanks to that team member’s bio page. This common interest has allowed them to engage in discussion and begin to foster a relationship that extends beyond the work they are paying us to do for them.

In terms of prospective clients, the feedback has been positive as well. In fact, we recently closed a deal where the client told us they hired us because of our bio pages. That client was wary about hiring a technology firm, fearing that we would only speak in techno‐babble and industry jargon and be on a different wavelength than their company. Seeing our interests outside the office, they immediately felt reassured that they could relate to us – a feeling they didn’t get when they looked at the websites of our competitors.

That’s a big win for personality if you ask me!

The argument against

The argument that I hear most frequently against adding personality to company or team bios is that it may turn some customers off and drive them away from your business. We worried about this ourselves when we decided to add the individual bio pages to our site.

It is true that a unique personality could drive some potential business away. But the better question is: should you really care? If you present your company’s true personality on your website, and that personality turns someone away, would you really have wanted to do business with them in the first place?

Yes, presenting a personality that is more than a safe buttoned-up suit-and-tie approach may turn some business away, but the reverse also holds true. The personality you reveal may very well be the deciding factor that sets your company apart in a  sea of sameness and actually attracts clients that may otherwise have passed you over – exactly as it did in the example I cited above. Had we not put our personality out there, we would not have won that business.

Finding the right fit

No one wants to turn business away, but the reality is that not every potential client will be compatible with the way you operate. Finding the right fit for your company is how you can achieve success in both the short and long term – because even if you do initially win over a company that isn’t truly a good fit for you, they are unlikely to stick around for long.

Finding the right fit allows you to build a relationship that may start with one job but grows stronger and deeper over time to create long‐term engagements and partnerships that can help drive success long after that first project becomes a distant memory. One of the ways to find this right fit is to always remain true to who your company is and not be afraid to let your personality shine through for all the world to see.

You’re not done yet

Finding ways to take “About Us” content from the typical company facts and figures to something that will differentiate your company is just one example of how rethinking content can make your website a more powerful conversion engine. Subsequent entries in this series will explore other common elements of website content that can be improved to bring more value to your visitors and greater returns for your business.

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Requiem for the Flash Intro: Seven Dying Trends in Website Design

Thanks to the now ubiquitous #TBT (that’s “throwback Thursday” for those of you who don’t speak hashtag), every week we’re all treated to a cringe-inducing trip down memory lane that takes us on a tour of our most regrettable fashion choices, whether it’s the bad perms and acid-washed jeans we sported in the 80s, the grunge-era plaid shirts and Doc Martens of the 90s or the velour sweatsuits and Carrie Bradshaw-inspired nameplate necklaces we left behind in the early aughts. Just as in fashion, website design trends come and go. What’s popular one day is old news the next. And just as you wouldn’t wear shoulder pads and stirrup pants to a sales meeting, you don’t want your website to be an embarrassing amalgamation of passé design trends. After all, if your website looks dated, it won’t inspire confidence among prospective customers that you’re on top of your game – no matter what game it is that you’re playing. Here are seven once-popular design trends that are fading fast – and that you should purge from your website as soon as you can:

1. Flash intros

Once upon a time, everybody and their brother wanted a Flash intro to create a memorable first impression. These days, though, having a Flash intro is a recipe for disaster. First, in today’s era of mobile surfing, speed and simplicity win the day. Keep in mind, too, that Flash and iOS do not mix, so your site won’t even be accessible to users on Apple gadgets. Also, today’s visitor demands more control and fewer bells and whistles that only serve as obstacles to accomplishing their end goal.

2. Pop-over windows

As site owners became increasingly eager to turn their web presence into full-blown conversion engines, the pop-over window rose to popularity. As soon as a new visitor lands on the site, BAM! they are greeted with a request to complete a form to provide their contact information in exchange for a welcome discount offer or to follow the company on Facebook for future updates and promotions, thus giving the company all the ammunition they need to continue their engagement long after that visitor has moved on to other corners of the Web. But while these pop-overs are good for site owners (at least in theory), they are very disruptive for the user and provide roadblocks that only make it more difficult for them to accomplish what they originally came to the site to do. As a result, any value that might be gained in collecting the user’s data is quickly negated if that user has no interest in continuing their as a result of this negative first encounter. Thankfully, good UX is winning this battle, and the pop-over is falling quickly out of favor. Reality has set in that no one comes to a site for the express purpose of helping the site’s owner market to them, so it’s hardly the best way to lay a foundation for a successful long-term relationship. Instead of leading off the conversation with your survey request, Facebook follow prompt or current promotion, simply allow your visitors to dive right into the site to find the information they’re seeking or complete their desired task. Keep your mailing list sign-up and Facebook links in your site’s universal framework, and if you do your job in creating a positive experience for them, your visitors will willingly allow you to become a presence in their email inbox or their Facebook news feed all on their own. Read more: Deal-Breakers and Dead-Ends: Six Turn-Offs That Alienate Website Visitors

3. Animated billboards

Oversized, rotating slideshows have become a common fixture on home pages in recent years, largely because they provide a way to present several key messages to the visitor without requiring them to scroll or to click past the initial page. However, UX tests show that these animated presentations are not as effective as we’d like to think. While the initial message in the carousel often prompts a click, the effectiveness of subsequent messages in the loop drops dramatically because many users do not stick around to see all of the slides. Other users ignore these animated areas completely, perceiving them as banner advertisements that should be glossed over in search of more meaningful content. The billboard remains a popular design feature; however, the trend is growing toward featuring a singular strong message in this area combined with a striking visual image. Streamlining and simplifying allows this one key idea to come across loud and clear rather than being lost among a muddled array of messages that are presented indiscriminately in the hopes that one will result in the desired outcome.

4. Information overload

Continuing with the theme of reductionism, today’s most successful websites pare down the information presented on the home page in order to create a cleaner, more focused presentation. This is in stark contrast to the approach that many sites took for years, which was to stuff the home page with as much information as possible in the hopes that visitors would find whatever they might be looking for on that page without having to dig any deeper. The result is a page that is utterly lacking in direction; nothing is emphasized because everything is emphasized. In the end, instead of being guided intuitively toward the information they seek, users are driven away by an overwhelming mess of content that is not properly organized and prioritized. To avoid this pitfall, focus on only the most important information for visitors while providing easy pathways, such as search tools and user-friendly site navigation, to help them find the content that lies deeper in the site. This approach will ultimately yield a better experience for your users and therefore better results for your company.

5. Drop-down menus

For years, the drop-down menu has been the go-to solution for streamlining a site’s primary navigation options while providing easy access to secondary pages. But with the advent of touch-based devices, which do not have a hover state, drop-down menus no longer serve the needs of all users. The simple fact of the matter is that with the rapid growth of mobile Web use, you simply can’t afford to risk leaving these visitors stranded with no way to delve beyond your site’s home page. Instead, a better solution for modern websites is to feature secondary page navigation options along the top or side of the page within the relevant section of the primary navigation. Read more: 3 Simple Rules for Navigation That Will Boost Your Website’s Performance

6. Contact forms

The contact form has long been a staple of websites – so much so that it’s often used in place of providing other means of contacting a company, such as a phone number or email address. However, more and more, site owners are choosing to eliminate this form altogether in an effort to provide a more personal, service-driven experience. Instead of having a visitor’s first interaction with their company occur via a cold, faceless web form that goes to an anonymous recipient and assures no timeline for response, the company elects to provide only their phone number so that the customer’s needs can be addressed immediately and directly by a live human being. While contact forms are not likely to disappear completely anytime soon, what is going away is the practice of relying on these forms as the sole vehicle for communication with customers and prospects.

7. Third-person narratives

Your website should embody the voice and personality of your brand. As such, it simply makes no sense for the content to be written from a third-person perspective, as if it’s being read to the user by a distant omniscient narrator. Instead, writing in the first-person creates a softer, more approachable tone that puts a human face on your company. It’s the difference between saying, “At Sanford & Son Remodeling, their goal is to ensure your satisfaction.” and “At Sanford & Son Remodeling, our goal is to ensure your satisfaction.” Which one feels more authentic? More warm and personable?

Beyond keeping up with the Jonses

Remember: keeping pace with the latest trends in website design is more than skin-deep. It’s not about having more bells and whistles than your competition; it’s about providing the best experience for all users, no matter how or where they’re accessing your site. By staying ahead of the curve, you’ll ensure that your site continually evolves to meet the needs and expectations of users who are constantly adapting to new devices and technologies.

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