About page

What an about page is

An about page is the page a buyer opens after they have decided you might be able to do the job, when what they want to know is whether you can be trusted with it. It answers three things: who is behind this business, who is it for, and is there any reason not to hire them. It is a trust page. Everything on it that does not build trust is taking up room.

It is not a history page. The founding year, the kitchen table it started on and the founder’s lifelong love of the trade are the things owners most want to write and the things buyers most reliably skip. It is not a staff directory either, which is what team biographies are for, nor the reusable paragraph you paste into directories and award entries, which is a company profile.

Who this is for

On most small business sites this is one of the most visited pages and the worst written one, because it was written last, by the owner, late at night, and never touched again. Three situations bring people here. The page opens with “founded in 2014 with a simple vision” and never says who you serve. The business has changed shape and the page still describes a company that no longer exists. Or sales conversations stall at the moment a buyer asks who would actually be doing the work.

You do not need this if the problem is the first page rather than the second. When visitors leave without ever reaching the about page, home page copy is the cheaper fix and comes first. And if every page on the site sounds like a different company, the about page is a symptom rather than the cause, and voice alignment is the work.

What goes in it

The fix on most about pages is subtraction before addition. The founding story usually goes; what replaces it is the material a buyer was looking for and could not find.

• Who you are for. The kinds of customer you do your best work for, named in the first two sentences, so the right reader recognises themselves and the wrong one leaves quietly.
• What you take on and what you do not. The jobs you turn down say more about competence than any adjective. A firm that says what it refuses is believed about what it accepts.
• The people. Who owns the business, who answers the phone, who turns up on site, with real names and real photographs. A buyer spending serious money wants to know how many of you there are.
• The evidence. Qualifications, licences, insurance, trade memberships, years trading, work you can show. Whatever is true and checkable.
• What dealing with you is like. How you quote, how you communicate, what you are strict about. Buyers cannot get this anywhere else, and it is almost always missing.

The founding story survives only where it explains something a buyer cares about. A roofer who started as an insurance adjuster has a reason to mention it. A roofer who has always liked working outdoors does not.

What you get

The page copy. The full about page written and in order, usually 400 to 700 words, with headings, photograph captions, image alternative text, the title tag and the meta description. Shorter than what it replaces, in almost every case.

A photograph and evidence list. A short brief naming the pictures worth taking, the certificates worth showing and the details worth confirming, so the page is not published with a stock image of a handshake.

A note on what was cut and why. One page. Owners are attached to the founding story, and the note is there so the decision can be argued with rather than quietly reversed six months later.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A three-person landscape design studio outside Guelph has an about page of about 900 words. The first 600 cover the founder’s grandmother’s garden, a trip to England and the decision to go out on her own; the rest is a mission statement about quality and passion. Nowhere does the page say that the studio works on residential properties only, that it designs and supervises but does not plant, or that there are three people rather than thirty.

The rewritten page runs to about 450 words. It opens by naming who the studio is for: homeowners with an established garden who want it redesigned rather than tidied, on properties large enough to need drawings. The next section says plainly that the studio designs and supervises but subcontracts the build. The third introduces all three people by name, with photographs taken on a real job, and says which of them a client deals with week to week. The last explains the quoting process and when a fee becomes payable. The grandmother stays, in one sentence, because she explains why the studio specialises in old gardens.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who buys from you, what they ask before they commit, and what the current page is failing to answer. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope, price and dates agreed before anything starts.
3. An interview. Forty-five minutes recorded with you, and where possible with whoever answers the phone. Most of the page comes out of this call rather than your existing copy.
4. The draft. Three to five working days. You read it cold before we talk. One round of changes is included.
5. Delivery. Final copy, the photograph brief and the note on what was cut, handed over together.

Ten working days from first call to final copy is typical for a single page.

What it costs

An about page is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the size varies: a sole trader and a twelve-person firm with three offices are not the same job. The price depends on how many people have to be interviewed and whether the page is written from scratch or cut down from what exists. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts, and the pricing page shows the four ways of working.

What happens next

An about page builds trust but rarely closes anything on its own. Most owners follow it with quotes from customers arranged to answer objections, since praise from a buyer outweighs anything you say about yourself, or with a case study showing one job from start to finish. If the page now does its job and the enquiry still does not arrive, the next honest place to look is what the contact page promises. None of that is assumed. The about page is complete work on its own.