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What Is The Future Of The About Us Page?

Thinking about the web site we are building for my new company.  One thing that seems like it is in some flux today is the dreaded “About Us” page.  To me, it used to be a one paragraph mission statement with a few links to a few static pages:

  • The Team
  • Investors/Board
  • News/Press
  • Jobs/Culture

Even Tumblr’s about us page is fairly typical and meets this standard.

But I get the distinct feeling that About Us pages are changing.  I have recently seen About Us links on web sites that were, rather than linking to an “About Us” page, links to:

  • The Company Blog
  • Wikipedia
  • Crunchbase
  • Facebook Fan Page
  • Twitter

All of these are most notable for their ease of maintainability.  Clearly, small companies think having an About Us page is a pain in the butt.

Certainly, the biggest change, in general, for About Us pages is the growth of Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages.  It seems like every company has a Twitter account and/or a Facebook Fan Page and they try to get people to follow them/be their fans.  So now every company has a link to these things on their web site.  Also, they want to push information out to these followers.  The result is that this is a fairly good place to keep information like “news/press” and “jobs”.  Now if your about page has this data, it becomes redundant data maintenance.

It takes a big marketing department to want to do that.

I am interested in everyone’s thoughts here.  What would you like to see my company do?

What Should I Do With My About Page?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Theories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “What Is The Future Of The About Us Page?”

  1. Peter Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 3:40 pm

    I just struggled with the same for my consultancy’s 1-day-old site. Maybe classic About Us is best for sites with repeat visitors who don’t want to see evergreen-ish content on homepage? But for brochure sites like mine, everyone is new, so why not promote classic AU content to homepage? As for your new-fangled AU content, is joinable stuff better for loyalists/repeat visitors, and would they expect to see it on an AU page, given the history? This is why I am behind on calling old friends, BTW.

  2. Peter Says:
    January 27th, 2010 at 3:41 pm

    I’m obligated to add, “look at the data” and “run a split test” since mine is a web analytics consultancy.