How do I write an about page?
The short answer
Write it about the customer's decision, not your history. The about page is where somebody who is nearly convinced goes to check whether they trust you — so it needs who you are, why you do this, who you do it for, and enough specific detail that it could not describe anyone else. Founding dates and mission statements do none of that work.
On this page
Who actually reads it
Owners consistently underestimate this page, because they assume nobody cares about their history. Mostly right, wrong conclusion.
The about page is one of the most-visited pages on a small business site, and the people reading it are not browsing. They are nearly convinced and doing a final check. They liked the work, the price is plausible, and now they want to know who they would be dealing with before they call.
That changes what the page is for. It is not a history. It is the last piece of evidence before a decision.
The four things it needs
1. Who you are. A real name, a real photograph, a real face. This is the single highest-impact element and the one most often replaced with a stock image or omitted entirely. If a business will not show me who runs it, I assume there is a reason.
2. Why you do this. Not a mission statement — the actual reason. "I was a chef for twelve years and got tired of cooking someone else's menu." "I started fixing friends' laptops and it got out of hand." Specific, slightly unglamorous origins are far more convincing than aspirational ones.
3. Who you are for. And, ideally, who you are not for. "We work mostly with independent restaurants and small studios" tells the right person they are in the right place and saves you the enquiry from the wrong one. Naming your customer is the fastest way to earn their attention.
4. Something that could only be you. A specific detail, a real number, a genuine constraint. "We only take four projects at a time." "Everything is made in the room behind the shop." "I answer the phone myself." One concrete fact does more than three paragraphs of adjectives.
The founder-story trap
There is a version of the about page that has become a genre: humble beginnings, a passion discovered, a commitment to quality, a journey.
The problem is not that it is false. It is that it is interchangeable. If you could swap your about page with a competitor's and neither customer would notice, the page is decorative.
The test is simple: read it and ask whether any sentence would be surprising if it appeared on a rival's site. Anything that would not be surprising is doing no work and can go. What is left is usually short, and short is fine.
What to cut
- Mission and vision statements. Nobody has ever chosen a business because of one.
- "Founded in 2011 with a passion for excellence." Founding date is fine as a fact. The rest is filler.
- Stock photographs of people who do not work for you. Actively harmful — see should I use stock photos.
- Values lists unless each one describes something you actually do differently. "Integrity" is not a value, it is a baseline.
- Company history nobody asked for. Two sentences, not five paragraphs.
Where it fits in the site
The about page is not a destination. It is a stop on the way to contacting you, which means it must end somewhere.
Finish it with the next step — book, call, enquire, see prices. A visitor who reaches the bottom of your about page is the warmest traffic on your site, and a page that simply stops wastes them.
It is also worth linking to from where trust is being decided: a services page, a pricing page, a proposal. Somebody who hesitates at the price often just wants to know who they would be paying.
What this looks like in Helm
The practical point about an about page is that it goes stale in a specific way that other pages do not: it describes people, and people change.
A team member who left in 2023 is still on most small business about pages. So is the photograph from the old premises, the number of years that stopped incrementing, and the description of a business that has since moved on. Every one of those quietly undermines exactly the trust the page exists to build — a visitor who spots one wonders what else is out of date.
That is a maintenance problem rather than a writing one, and it is why the page text and images being fields you edit matters more here than almost anywhere else on the site. On Helm you change a paragraph or swap a photograph and press Go Live, in both languages if you run in both. Unglamorous, and it is the difference between an about page that builds trust and one that leaks it.
The short version
Write it for somebody who is nearly convinced. A real face, a real reason, a named customer, and one specific fact that could only be you. Cut anything a competitor could have written. Finish with a next step. Then keep it true, because an out-of-date about page does the opposite of what it was built for.