Nearly all websites you find online have what should be a seemingly straight forward page on their site called the "About Us" page. Sounds pretty simple, a page that talks all about who that organization/group/person is. That really should be easy considering how much people love to talk about themselves. However, more often then not the "About Us" page turns into a catchall for all the marketing lingo or the historical background the might date back to before the Egyptians and even worse, far too much information about that site.
Yes, coming across one of these "About Us" pages is usually a pretty good sign that whoever put that site didn't have a great understanding of web marketing. So how do you go about making an "About Us" page a valuable part of your website, let's answer that question and more. What's it actually for? What do you put on an "About Us" page? How long should I make my page? Does anyone ever actually read that page, it's so boring?
What is an "About Us " page for?
The "About Us" pages purpose is to give visitors of you site quick information about who/what/why your site exists. It should answer basic questions visitors might have about your site, who you are, where you are located what basic services or products you provide.
How should I structure the page?
Start off with a short, but meaningful, summary about you site, this lets your visitors know quickly who you are. Also, answer the most common and basic questions here, don't use up too much space because web users have short attention spans.
Content
Next should be the primary content of the page, here you will take your summary and expand on it. Provide more detail about who your company is, what its purpose for existence is and how it benefits is customers. One of two things usually happens here, first this section ends up just being a repeat of the summary or it ends up being an term paper that is ten pages long. Both of these are bad, it should be between 1 – 1 1/2 pages in length. When writing an About Us page it is easy to start giving too much information in one area, if you find yourself doing this save what you write and create a specific page to address that topic, this gives you more copy for your site, and keeps your About Us page trim and neat.
Break it up
Another import thing that you should do is make sure that you don't have too many big chunks of text. When there are big chunks of text visitors have a harder time scanning the content and it makes it harder for them to find what they want which causes them to look somewhere else. Break up those chunks of text and add some headers above them to help visitors find the information they want, they don't necessarily want to read the entirety of your page but rather might be looking for specific information about you, the more you can help them the more likely they get past your "About Us" page into the good stuff of your site.
Affiliates
It is also a good idea to include in affiliations with any other organizations that you work with and provide a link to their site. This can be a positive effect because if you are affiliated with another organization that your visitor already trusts it gives you more credibility. The opposite effect will happen as well, if you affiliate with organizations that are questionable or have bad reputations, you should reconsider your association with that organization.
Contact
Lastly you should put your basic contact information, phone, email, address etc. This does two things, web users can be a distrusting sort and it isn't always easy to win them over, and not having real contact information like a phone number and address, gives them the impression that you are a fly by night operation. So put up some real info where people can contact you if they need to. Second, people will always need to contact you, feedback from the users of your site is paramount to providing good customer service, be you a local non-profit or a multi-billion dollar industry, open as many lines of communication as you can with the people who use your site.
Conclusion
While this should help you create a better "About Us" page don't consider your work done, no organization remains exactly the same forever, often these pages get forgotten about and have old, inaccurate information, make sure you keep them up to date and current so that accurately tell your potential visitors who you are. Hope this helps you out!