What to put on an About page that gets you hired

Nobody reads an About page to learn about you. They read it to decide whether to trust you with money, a wall, a body, a wedding day. Every About page that works is answering that question; every one that does not is a biography written for the person who wrote it.

What the visitor is actually checking

• Are you a real person, and are you still trading?
• Have you done this specific thing before, for someone like me?
• Are you qualified, insured, registered — whatever my trade expects?
• Will I like dealing with you for the length of this job?
• How do I start, and what happens next?

Five questions, and "I have always been passionate about design since I was a child" answers none of them.

The order that works

1. 1One sentence: what you do, for whom, where. The same sentence you would say at a party, with the town in it.
2. 2The proof: years doing it, the qualification, the number of weddings or clients or rooms. One or two facts, specific and true.
3. 3How you work — the thing that is different about dealing with you. Not adjectives; a description. "I only take two weddings a month" beats "bespoke, personal service".
4. 4Who it is for, and quietly, who it is not. This is the paragraph that stops the wrong enquiries.
5. 5The human bit, kept short. Where you live, what you were doing before, the dog. Two sentences buy warmth; a paragraph buys nothing.
6. 6What to do next, with a link. Every page ends somewhere, and this one should end at booking, prices, or a portfolio.

The photograph

Put your face on it. A page with a photograph of a person converts better than one without, and a stock photo of a laptop and a coffee cup converts worse than nothing at all. It does not need to be a professional headshot — daylight, plain background, looking at the camera, taken by a friend is enough.

If you work with your hands, a second photograph of you working is worth more than a better portrait. People buy the work, and the picture of it being done is the evidence.

Words to take out

• "Passionate", "bespoke", "seamless", "solutions" — every competitor has written them, so they carry no information.
• Third person about yourself on a one-person business site. It reads as a press release from a company of one.
• A founding date used as a whole paragraph. It is a fact, not a story.
• Anything that would be equally true of any other business in your trade. If it would, delete it.

Keep it current

Update it whenever the facts move — the number of years, the new qualification, the service you stopped offering. An About page that still says "recently launched" three years later tells a visitor the site is abandoned, and that is the one impression it cannot afford to give.