What Should an About Page Say?
A good about page answers four questions in order: who are you, what do you make, who is it for, and why should this particular reader believe you. Skip any one of them and the page reads as filler rather than an answer. The "who are you" part is not a biography, it is the handful of details that explain your judgement, the training, the years at the bench, the reason you started. The "what you make" part should be concrete enough that a stranger could describe your work to a friend after one read. The "who is it for" part names the customer you serve best, rather than trying to sound like you serve everyone. And the "why believe you" part is where most pages go quiet, because it needs proof, a named client, a real photograph, a specific result, not a claim about quality that any competitor could copy and paste.
Notice what is missing from that list. There is no line for a mission statement written in the passive voice, and no line for adjectives like passionate or dedicated. A customer reading your about page has already decided you make things. What they are testing for is whether you are the maker who understands them. Write to that test and the page earns its place. Write to sound impressive and it gets skimmed and closed.
Why Do Most About Pages Fail to Get Read?
The honest answer is that most about pages were written for the business rather than the customer, and it shows. Nielsen Norman Group's research into about pages found that most sites carry an about section, but the pages often do a poor job of clearly communicating the most important information about the organisation, burying the details a visitor wants under vague mission language. A visitor arrives with a specific question, usually some version of "can I trust this person with my money", and a page that answers a different question, "how proud are we of ourselves", loses them within seconds.
There is a sharper reason this matters now than it did five years ago. Trust in a business's own account of itself has fallen, and fallen unevenly by age. A recent consumer trust survey found that every younger demographic now trusts anonymous strangers discussing a brand online more than they trust what that brand says about itself on its own website, according to Market My Market's 2026 consumer trust survey. Read that plainly. The page you wrote to build trust is, for a growing share of your visitors, worth less than a comment thread you have never seen. That is not a reason to give up on the page. It is a reason to fill it with the kind of proof a stranger on a forum cannot fabricate, real names, real work, real specifics.
Why Trust Now Has to Be Earned Through Proof
The deeper shift behind that scepticism is worth naming, because it changes how you should write. Edelman's 2026 research into brand trust describes a world that has turned inward and grown wary of outside claims, concluding that in an insular world, brands do not have the licence to declare they are relevant and trustworthy, it must be proven out by experience. An about page that announces its own relevance, in the way many still do, is making exactly the claim this research says no longer lands. The fix is not cleverer wording. It is evidence a reader can check.
That research also points to what a business can control. Reporting on the same 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report, Adgully found that utility remains the strongest driver of relevance, cited by 85 percent of respondents. For a creative business, utility is not an abstract word. It is the specific problem you solve for the specific person you serve, the wedding photographer who works with couples who hate posed shots, the illustrator who draws board game boxes rather than illustration in general. An about page that shows how you are useful to a named kind of person does more for trust than a page that insists it is trustworthy.
How an About Page Builds Mental Availability
Step back from the wording and there is a structural job the about page does for a small business, one that has less to do with persuasion and more to do with memory. Marketing effectiveness research has spent decades establishing that brands grow by being easy to recall in the moment a buyer needs them, a shift marketing scientists describe by saying the field's major contribution was to move attention from what a brand evokes in people's minds to what evokes the brand, as Marketing Week's 2026 coverage of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's work sets out. Your about page is one of the strongest places to build that link, because it is where a curious visitor spends the longest, undistracted moment with your business.
The trigger for that recall is not the business, it is the situation the buyer is in. As Insight Platforms explains, the buying situations that bring a customer to mind of a brand are not defined by the brand at all, they are defined by the buyer. That is a useful discipline for an about page. Instead of writing about the situations that flatter you, write about the situations your reader is in when they need you: the panicked call about a leaking roof, the wedding six weeks out with no photographer booked, the office that has outgrown its branding. Name the situation and the reader recognises themselves, and recognising themselves is the moment they start reading properly.
How to Position Your About Page So Customers Get It
Positioning is the discipline of deciding, on purpose, what you are the best choice for and for whom, rather than letting a vague sense of "we do lovely work" stand in for a decision. An about page is where that decision either shows or does not. Vague positioning produces a vague about page, a page that could belong to any competent maker in your trade. Clear positioning produces a page that reads as though it could only have been written by you, because it names the specific alternative a customer was weighing you against and says plainly why you are the right one.
This matters more, not less, in a country with as many small businesses as the UK has. At the start of 2025 there were 5.64 million small businesses in the UK, according to the Department for Business and Trade's business population estimates, making up almost the entire business population. Against that scale, sounding like a competent generalist is close to invisible. Naming the specific customer you serve, the specific problem you solve, and the specific reason you are the right maker for it, is what lets a reader place you against the alternatives they were considering and choose you on purpose.
What to Include
However short the page, a handful of parts do the real work.
A founding reason, the honest, specific circumstance that led you to start, told in a sentence or two rather than a paragraph of scene-setting. A who you serve line, naming the customer you are the right answer for rather than trying to widen the net. A proof section, real client names, a real photograph of finished work, a specific outcome, the kind of detail a competitor cannot copy without lying. A personality, the voice, tone and small recurring details that make the page recognisably yours if the logo were removed. And a clear next step, a single obvious action for a reader who has decided they trust you.
Notice that a founding reason is not the same thing as your full brand story. Your about page carries the short, working version of who you are; the fuller narrative of how your business came to be, what you believe, and how that shapes the work belongs on a page of its own, and our guide to writing a brand story walks through building that longer version properly.
How People Land on Your About Page Now
The habits that bring a visitor to your about page have shifted too, and it is worth writing for the shift rather than for how browsing used to work. Ofcom's research into UK online behaviour found that the proportion of people exploring new websites fell from 70 percent to 56 percent over the period studied, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Fewer people are wandering around the web out of curiosity. The people who do land on your about page have usually arrived on purpose, already curious about you specifically, which raises the value of the page and lowers your patience for filler.
That makes the about page one of the highest-stakes pages a small business owns, because the visitor reaching it has already crossed several hurdles to get there. It is worth looking at how a real business handles this trade-off. Ours is built around the same rules this guide sets out, naming who Compass is for and what it does, and you can see the shape of it on our own about page.
How Story and Showmanship Make an About Page Memorable
Creative businesses have an advantage here that a lot of owners underuse. Marketing has always worked less like an argument and more like a piece of entertainment, and the businesses that stick in memory are usually the ones that told a story or held a detail rather than the ones that listed the most persuasive facts. That is as true of an about page as it is of an advert. A page that opens with a specific, slightly odd, entirely true detail, the material you learned to work with by accident, the client who talked you into your strangest commission, does more to be remembered than a page that opens with a mission statement.
This is also where distinctive touches earn their keep. A recurring phrase, a particular way you describe your process, a photograph style that is unmistakably yours, these are small things that make your about page recognisable even without your name attached, and recognisable is the whole point of the page. Write your about page like a piece your reader would recognise as yours if you took your name off it, and it becomes an asset rather than a formality, sitting alongside the fuller brand story that carries the longer version of the same idea.
Common About Page Mistakes
A short list of habits undo more about pages than anything else. Writing in the passive voice about the business rather than in a real voice about a real person, so the page reads like a press release nobody asked for. Leading with adjectives instead of proof, calling the work exceptional rather than showing a piece of it. Trying to serve every possible customer at once, which leaves no reader feeling specifically spoken to. Skipping the founding reason entirely and jumping straight to services, which leaves the "who are you" question unanswered. And writing the page once and never returning to it, so it falls out of date while the rest of the business moves on. Fix these and an ordinary about page becomes the page that turns a curious visitor into an enquiry.
