The About page test.

The About page is the second page a serious buyer opens, right after the one that tells them what you sell. They are not there for your history. They are there to answer one question: are these people going to be a problem?

What the reader is actually checking

1. Are you real? Names, faces, a city, a phone number that belongs to a person.
2. Have you done this before? For someone like them, ideally.
3. What will it be like to work with you? Fast? Fussy? Will you argue with them?
4. Is there anything odd here? Everyone is scanning for the thing that will turn into a headache later.

Nothing on that list is served by “Founded in 2019 with a vision to deliver excellence”.

The lines to cut, today

• “We are a team of passionate professionals.” Every company says this. Nobody advertises indifferent amateurs.
• “Our mission is to deliver customer-centric solutions.” Cover the logo: it fits a dentist, a dairy or a defence contractor.
• “We believe in quality.” As opposed to?
• The founding story that starts with the industry. “The world of content is changing fast.” Nobody has ever hired anybody because of a paragraph about the world.

If a sentence would be equally true of your competitor, it is taking up space that could be doing work.

What goes in instead, in this order

One sentence that could only be about you. Ours is that four people in Ahmedabad write the words brands get judged by, and build the websites those words live on. Yours might be that you have been fixing the same kind of machine for eleven years, or that you only work with two clients at a time.

The people, with names and faces. Not stock photos, and not job titles alone. A real photograph of a real person outperforms every paragraph on the page, and a small joke in the caption does more for trust than a paragraph about values.

How you work, said plainly. How fast you reply. How many rounds of changes. What you do when something goes wrong. This is the section people actually read twice, because it is the one that predicts their next three months.

What you refuse. The bravest line on any About page is the one that turns someone away. “We don't take on projects under a lakh.” “We don't do same-day.” Saying no to the wrong client is the clearest signal you are right for the right one.

Proof, close to the bottom. Two or three names, or one piece of work described in a line. Not a logo wall of everyone you have ever invoiced.

A way to reach a human. A number, not only a form. The form makes them wonder who answers it.

Length, tone, and the photograph question

Three hundred to six hundred words is plenty. Longer is fine if it stays specific and gets funnier, which is rare. Write it in first person if one person runs the company, and in “we” if more than one person answers the phone. Do not write in third person about yourself; nobody has believed that since 2006.

And yes, put your face on it. Every objection to this is really a preference about photographs, and every buyer in India is quietly checking whether there is a person behind the logo.

A five-minute rewrite

1. Delete every sentence that passes the thumb test, that is, every one that survives with the name covered.
2. Read what's left. If it is two sentences, good; that is your real About page.
3. Add the people, the way you work, and one thing you refuse.
4. Put a number on the page.
5. Read it aloud. Anything you would not say to a stranger at a wedding comes out.

Ours is here, including six job titles that used to belong to one person. If you would rather someone else did the deleting, that is what the website content service is.