The ‘About Us’ section is a very important, but often overlooked, area of your website. This quick tutorial provides a rough guide to creating a helpful and informative piece of copy, which will present your company in a good light.

1. Summarise at the top

Because not all customers will have the patience to read your entire site, it’s a good idea to provide a brief summary at the top of the page. A good summary should provide an outline of your offering, and provide the customer with your unique selling point. For example:

“Gorilla Electronics is a Worcestershire-based company that specialises in providing quality appliances for your business. We offer personalised service and strong warranties to back our products.”

2. Write a quick outline before you start

Before you start writing, it's always worth taking a few minutes to plan what you're going to write. If you're a one-man-band, you may want to refer to yourself in the first person (e.g. “I sell monkeys”). However, if you have a few employees or want to portray yourself as a larger business, you may want to refer to the business (e.g. “We sell monkeys”).

3. Keep it short, sharp, and to the point

When business owners sit down to write content, they are often overcome by an unexplained phenomenon known only as ‘waffleism’. Symptoms include an unstoppable urge to blurt out marketing buzzwords at every opportunity, and the only known cure is a short, sharp slap to the face.

The “About Us” page needs to portray a positive image of your business, so think about the message you’re trying to put across and how you can say it in simple, professional English.

4. Break it down into sections

When people visit the "About Us" section, they are looking for information which will help them decide if they want to do business with you. Your aim, therefore, is to create a page which is informative enough to satisfy the customer’s curiosity, without driving the customer away through boredom.

One way to achieve this is to break the page down into sections. This simple measure enables the customer to quickly scan the page, and choose which pieces of information they wish to view in more detail.

*No monkeys were harmed in the writing of this article.

Mat Durham is owner of Worcestershire Web Design Agency, Durham Productions, and writes articles on web design and Internet related topics. For more, please visit his website on www.durhamproductions.co.uk.

© Mat Durham. Please feel free to reproduce, with this footer text and links intact.