An About Page With No People On It

The page

Four hundred and twenty words under a heading reading About Us.

Founded on a commitment to quality. A team of dedicated professionals. Passionate about delivering exceptional service. Building lasting relationships with our clients.

One stock photograph of a group of people in an office, none of whom work there.

No names, no faces, no indication of whether this is one person or thirty, and no year the business started.

Who reads this page and why

Fewer people than the home page and with far more intent.

They have decided you might be suitable and are now checking who they would actually be dealing with, which is the last question before making contact.

For anybody entering a home, handling money, or being trusted with something that matters, that question is the whole decision.

A page of values does not answer it, and a stock photograph of strangers answers it in the wrong direction, since a visitor who recognises the image learns that the business chose to show people who do not work there.

The three questions the page should answer

• Who runs this, by name.
• How many people are there.
• How long have they been doing it.

The second matters more than businesses expect. A customer wants to know whether the person who quotes is the person who attends, and whether there is anybody else if that person is ill.

Why the people are missing

The reasons are real and each has a workable answer.

The owner does not like being photographed, which is common and is solved by a photograph taken while working rather than a portrait.

The business is one person and the owner thinks naming that makes it look small, which is usually mistaken since customers frequently prefer dealing with the owner.

Staff change, and a team page goes out of date, which is solved by naming the owner and describing the team in general terms.

Or privacy, which is legitimate for staff and less so for the person whose name is on the business.

None of those requires a page with nobody on it, and all of them produce one by default.

A worked example

The business replaced the page with about two hundred words.

The owner's name, how long he had been in the trade, why he started the business, and what he did before.

A photograph of him on a job, taken on a phone, not a portrait.

A line saying there were four of them, that he attends most jobs himself, and that the same person who quotes usually does the work.

Two sentences about what they will not take on, which did more for credibility than the four hundred words about quality had.

The page became one of the most visited on the site, and enquiries began referring to him by name before any conversation had happened.

Saying what you will not do

The unexpected item that carried the most weight, and it belongs here rather than on a service page.

A business that names the work it declines is demonstrating judgement, and judgement is what somebody is trying to assess.

It also filters enquiries usefully, since the people who would have been a poor fit stop contacting you.

Two sentences is enough: the kind of job you are not set up for, and who to try instead.

That is more persuasive than any claim about standards, because a business claiming to do everything well is claiming something nobody believes.

Stock photographs of people are the worst option

Worth isolating, since a peopleless page is frequently filled with them.

A photograph of strangers in an office communicates that the business had no photographs of its own and chose to imply it did.

Anybody who has seen the same image elsewhere, which happens more often than businesses expect, has learned something specific.

No photograph is better than a false one, and a phone photograph of the actual owner beats both comfortably.

If nobody will be photographed, show the work, the van, or the workshop instead, which at least depicts the real business.

Length is not the problem

Since the instinct after reading this is to write more.

Two hundred specific words outperform six hundred general ones, and the version that failed here was longer than the version that worked.

Cut anything that a competitor could also write: commitment, passion, dedication, exceptional service, customer focus.

Keep anything only you could write: the name, the year, the previous job, the reason for starting, the number of people, what you decline.

That test removes most about pages entirely and leaves the part worth reading.

Where else the name should appear

Because fixing the about page alone leaves the rest of the site anonymous.

The owner's name belongs in the email signature, on the quote, in the voicemail greeting, and in review replies.

Those are the places a customer encounters between reading the site and meeting somebody, and consistency across them is what makes the name stick.

A quote signed with the business name rather than a person's is a small missed opportunity at exactly the moment somebody is deciding.

The same photograph used on the about page also works as a listing profile image, which is where a proportion of people will see you first.

The counter-case within the page

Some businesses genuinely should not name people.

Anybody who has experienced harassment, anybody working in a field where identification carries risk, and businesses where staff have asked not to be named all have real reasons.

In those cases the owner's first name, the number of people, and the years in operation still answer most of the question without exposing anybody.

A larger business also legitimately describes itself rather than its individuals, since a customer is not dealing with a named person.

The failure here was not the absence of a team page. It was that nothing on the page identified a business at all.

What to change

1. Name the owner.
2. Add a photograph taken while working.
3. Say how many people there are.
4. Say how long you have been doing it.
5. Say who attends the job.
6. Say what you decline.
7. Delete anything a competitor could write.

Step six did the most here, since naming the work you turn down demonstrates judgement that no claim about quality can.

What else belongs on the page is covered in the about page nobody reads.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.