The About page is usually a site’s second most visited page, and it is visited with one question: can I trust these people? Visitors click About when they are interested but not convinced, which makes it a closing page wearing a biography costume. Most businesses waste it on a mission statement. Here is what it should do instead.
What visitors are actually checking
Not your founding story for its own sake, but signals: are you real people, are you competent, are you my kind of people, and will you still exist next year? The About page answers with faces, names, evidence, and tone. This is the credibility check at its most personal, and for small companies it matters most of all, because the people are the product.
The structure that works
Open with why you exist, in reader terms. Not “founded in 2019 with a passion for excellence” but the problem you kept seeing and decided to fix. One short paragraph, the copywriting rules at full strength.
Show the humans. Real names, real photos, real roles. A team of two presented honestly beats a wall of stock diversity, and fake imagery here is a trust bomb. If you are a solo founder, say so with confidence; clients fear hidden smallness, not smallness.
Prove the competence. Years, projects shipped, clients served, credentials, and links into the work itself. The About page is allowed to brag if the brags are verifiable.
Say how you work. Values earn their place only as behaviors: “we reply within a day”, “we show work weekly”, “we tell you when you do not need us”. Behaviors are checkable; adjectives are wallpaper.
End with the next step. Interested-but-unconvinced is exactly who reads to the bottom, so close with the same primary action as everywhere else, contact, book, see pricing.
The mistakes that repel
Third-person corporate voice for a three-person team, stock photos of other people’s offices, a timeline of internal milestones nobody outside cares about, and the mission paragraph that could belong to any company alive. Each one signals performance instead of personhood, on the one page whose only job is being believably human.
The honest-website advantage
An About page with real faces, plain speech, and checkable claims is rare enough to be a differentiator, the same reason authored design beats generated sameness. Ours says who we are in two sentences and points at live work; that is the whole trick.
Rewriting yours is an afternoon: draft with the structure above, cut a third, and add one real photograph. Or have us build the whole trust layer: hello@beconfidency.agency.
Thinking like this is the day job of our web design service.