About

• Get the point across
  First and foremost an About Us page has to get a point across. Everything else is completely useless unless the content and the layout is achieving a goal. That goal is to tell the user who you are by showing them what you can do for them or have done for others.
• Quickly direct you to useful content or people
  Some About Us pages spend the whole time talking about what it is that the company does and nothing about the staff members. Some do the opposite. Good pages should know why you are on the page and what you’re trying to find quickly.
• Give you authenticity statements
  A good About Us page always needs to have some mention of past successes, achievements, social proof, etc. Giving concrete examples of why your site or blog is worth reading is extremely important for these pages.
• Contain an email sign up form
  Since writing this post I have included an email sign up form on my About page and have seen a hugely successful subscriber rate. It seems that people want to subscribe to you while they are reading about you!

I didn’t want to go in to too much detail here because I am going to talk about the advantages of each About Us page as we go through them. I’m hoping to use this post as a way of showing you what I believe you should be doing on your own page.

The best About Us pages on the internet

Let’s jump right in and start looking at these About pages. As always, if you have any other suggestions from sites that I have missed please leave a comment and let me know. Even more importantly, if you don’t like one of these pages I would love to hear why not. Oh, and these are in no particular order. I just couldn’t do it.

Let’s start with Brian Clark the Copyblogger. As you can see from the screen shot it starts out by talking about others, not himself.

How different and refreshing it is from the usual, “I am so and so and I am doing such and such”. The Copyblogger about page is all about you and what you will learn from his website. It isn’t until way down the page that he actually introduces who he is.

Most “experts” start their about pages talking about themselves. Here Clark gives reasons why his blog will help you. What this does is actually give his following credentials more weight because you are curious as to who is providing all this amazing value. Rather than talking about how good he is, he lets his examples talk for him.