Day Ten: Or we can talk about About, or even about Us. The point is, there’s some disagreement about About on your website. About how important About is, about if it should be About Us rather than About or even Us. But I’m stepping in to call a truce. I think it is important and it starts with some pretty interesting research. If you’re in the B2B world, where many of us reside quite frequently, there’s a February 2014 report titled What B2B Buyers Want From Vendor Websites and the insights are quite telling.

When respondents were asked what types of information they want from a B2B website, 90% said information about Products and Services. This makes sense. It also makes sense that 68% wanted contact information, although not as much sense. But coming in third at 61% was About, well ahead of the fourth place finisher, Marketing Collateral. On every one of our websites, and nearly everyone of our client’s website, About is always in the top 10 in the content drilldown. As I said, it’s important but not worth fighting over if it should be About Us or About, but for my money, less is more.

Don’t put About in the utility navigation. Do spend a lot of time writing the page. Don’t get hung-up on your history, as Thomas Jefferson said, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” I get the irony; I’m going back 200 years to tell you don’t go back 200 years. Can you say who you are, what you do, and why you do it in two short paragraphs? You do that in a conversation everyday, which means you should be able to do that on your website. Don’t get hung-up on thinking your About page needs to be written like everyone’s About page. I just wrote a page for a large construction company that consisted entirely of an emotional story about what we do and why we do it from the CEO. And the reason I did that was because every general contractor’s About text was the same as the next.

Thanks for letting me talk about About.