What your about page is really saying

The about page is the only page on your website where you’re allowed to talk about yourself and most businesses use that permission to say almost nothing.

Not because they don’t have anything to say. Because they’re frightened of saying the wrong thing.

So they say the safe thing, which turns out to be its own kind of wrong.

Here’s what I mean.

A close reading

Take this sentence, which I have seen in approximately four hundred variations:

“We are a passionate team of dedicated professionals committed to delivering exceptional results for our clients.”

Read it properly and it contains zero usable information.

Passionate about what? Dedicated in what sense, as opposed to the undedicated professionals down the road?

Exceptional by whose measure? Committed to delivering results is the minimum contractual position of any business that would like to continue existing.

It’s not a differentiator. It’s a description of being open.

The sentence isn’t dishonest. It’s just empty in a very specific way, which is that every single word was chosen to be agreeable rather than accurate.

Nobody wrote it. It assembled itself out of available parts that had been pre-approved for not causing problems.

Now take this, a type I encounter less often but remember much longer:

“We started this because we kept seeing the same bad job done by people who knew better and didn’t care.”

That’s a sentence with a person behind it. It has a slightly uncomfortable edge. It implies an opinion.

It is, crucially, not something every business could say, which makes it the opposite of the first example. It differentiates by being specific enough to potentially put someone off.

Which is exactly what differentiation is supposed to do.

The vocabulary of hedging

About pages have their own dialect and it’s worth knowing how to read it.

“Solutions” means products or services, but vaguer.

When a company calls what it does a solution, it’s leaving room to be whatever you need. This sounds flexible. It reads as not knowing what you sell.

“We partner with our clients” means we work for them, but the word partner implies equality, shared risk, collaborative investment.

It’s a flattering reframe of a commercial relationship. Clients notice. They don’t say anything. They just don’t quite believe it.

“Our journey” implies a story worth telling, which is sometimes true but usually isn’t.

The journey framing promises narrative and typically delivers chronology, we were founded, we grew, we moved to bigger offices.

That’s not a journey. That’s a timeline with feelings attached.

“Values-driven” is the current apex of this particular genre.

Every organisation that says it is values-driven implies that others are not, which would make them the exception rather than the rule, which cannot be true.

The phrase has been used so often to signal trustworthiness that it now signals nothing except familiarity with the convention.

None of these words are banned. They all have legitimate uses.

The problem is specifically when they cluster together, which they do, reliably, because they’re all doing the same job: sounding like a professional organisation without committing to anything a professional organisation could be held to.

What self-presentation actually requires

The about page requires answering a question most businesses haven’t consciously sat with, what is actually distinct about us and do we want to say it out loud?

The second half of that question is the difficult bit.

Distinction usually involves an edge somewhere. A point of view on the industry. A type of client you’re not for. A way of working that not everyone will prefer. A reason you started that isn’t entirely flattering to whoever you started it in reaction to.

Committing to any of those things on a public page feels risky because it is, slightly.

Some people will read it and decide you’re not for them. The mistake is thinking that’s a problem.

Those people were going to decide that anyway, probably after a call you both wasted.

The about page doing it faster is a feature.

The businesses with the best about pages have usually resolved the internal question before they started writing.

They know what they think, they’ve decided to say it and the words follow from that.

The businesses with the worst about pages often haven’t resolved it yet and the copy reflects that, comprehensive, careful and somehow absent.

The founder photo problem

While we’re here. The photo of the founder or the team exists to make the business feel human, which is a reasonable instinct.

What it communicates depends almost entirely on what’s happening in the image.

The crossed-arms headshot against a grey background says, I’m serious, I’m a professional, I have done a photograph.

It is not warm. It is not particularly human. It is a passport photo with slightly better lighting.

The forced-casual photo, leaning on a desk, laughing at something just off-camera, holding a coffee cup as a prop, is trying hard enough that the trying is visible.

You can see the brief. You can see the instruction to look relaxed. The relaxation is therefore absent.

The photo that works is the one where something specific is true about it.

An environment that’s genuinely yours. An expression that’s genuinely yours. Something that couldn’t have come from a stock photo shoot because it contains actual information about you, which is the point of having it there at all.

Why it’s the hardest page to write

Every other page on the site has a clear job. The services page describes what you offer. The case studies page proves you can do it. The contact page invites action.

The about page’s job is to make someone trust you, which is the output of everything else working together and also something that can’t be directly requested.

You can’t write “you should trust us” and have it land.

The trust has to come from the read, from the accumulation of specific and honest details that add up to a picture of a real business with a real point of view.

That’s harder than describing a service. It requires self-knowledge, some nerve and the willingness to sound like yourself rather than the category average of a professional organisation in your sector.

Most about pages are written by people who wanted to do the second thing. The ones worth reading were written by people willing to do the first.

If your about page is currently doing the safe thing and you’d like it to do something more useful, I’d enjoy the conversation.