Best Practices for an About Us page
Your About Us Page should convey who it’s for: the potential customer or potential employee, or even a potential investor. Before you launch into the design phase, you should determine which of these audiences is slightly more vital to your marketing goals. Then work to make it appeal to that audience. (A note on the investor audience—showing alignment between your provided solutions and your “why” will set you apart from your competition.)
Website Architecture
At Solid Digital, we typically like to make an About Us page to speak to both audiences. A career page will be more geared toward potential employees, touting culture, values, benefits, and job openings. A team page is more geared toward potential customers, identifying your leadership team and making employee contact info available. When you understand your audience, you know exactly how a team page should fit into your UX journey. The easiest way? Keep everything on one page. If you need to, create two: a team and a career page. In terms of team member display, if you have a huge team and wish to display every person, that could be a trigger for breaking info out into two pages.
Website Design
When it comes to your design, keep it simple. Brand personality exercises in our Learning & Discovery phases of website design projects help inform the design and messaging, so your About Us page design can show a glimpse into your company. As you’re able, include your brand personality, and allow some of your team’s personalities to come through as well with hover animations and more. This engages the audience and helps them relate to the actual human beings behind your brand.
Website Content
What to include? Dealer’s choice—but we typically recommend the following for your Team Page:
- Headline and subhead: Grab their attention and keep it.
- Values/mission/vision: Tell them what’s important to you.
- Employee information: Show them who they’re working with.
- Leadership: Indicate who’s the boss.
- DEI: Photos can help show that diversity, equity, and inclusions are folded into your company’s culture. Consider including statements to this end, as well.
- Location and Collaboration methods: Show where and how your team works.
- Press/News: Create links to the latest and draw readers further into your site.
- Professional photography: If you want to look like pros, you’ll have to hire one to take your photos: candids or headshots.
- Call to Action: Want to attract talent? “View Careers.” Want to start a conversation? “Contact us.”
- Bonus Options: Department indicators can be helpful (sales, marketing) and showing a timeline and/or history if it’s interesting or engaging can be a welcome addition to an About Us page.
Balancing Content and Design
With all that content, how can you keep the page attractive in design? Utilize pop up bios for your employees—hover animations/changes are particularly helpful here—and give glimpses of info rather than diving in too far. (In UX designer speak, use the progressive disclosure technique.) If you have more content you need to add to create the full picture, separate pages can be added—with a simple “Read More” button.
Our Favorite Team Page Builds
If you’ve browsed our portfolio, you’ll see we’ve worked on all manner of websites. These, however, were some of our favorite About Us pages we’ve designed so far:
LivCor
LivCor’s messaging and a specially recorded audio clip beckon the audience in; they’ve included more than the leadership in their About Us page, and allow hover animation to reveal quotes and show the more personal side of their employees with an “outside the office” photo.
Why we love it: LivCor focused on its individual employees to frame the story with messaging, letting them tell the story.
Sterling Trading Tech
When a company is in financial trading, the look has to be a bit more “business.” But they balanced this well with a fun employee description under each headshot.
Why we love it: STT’s brand personality comes through with this technical presentation and speaks to their audience of their proficiency in the field.
Restaurant365
With fun imagery and clear mission, vision, and values, this page showcases Restaurant365 as a growing leader in the industry (see the cool animations?) and is clearly focused on potential employees.
Why we love it: The photos show core values. Their How We Work and Where We Work sections are meant to attract future talent and grow even more.
Catchword
With “word” in their name, you can bet that there was plenty of content to go around on this company’s page. This branding agency that specializes in naming services placed their headings at different positions to showcase their design—through words.
Why we love it: Employee info doesn’t have to be drab—Catchword’s are visually interesting and unique—and by creating a pop up design for employee bios, they can let visuals come first, and more info pop up for those who are interested without overwhelming page visitors.
Hireology
The culture of Hireology is spot on in this example—and the video in addition to a different, fun design is a great way to engage their audience, too.
Why we love it: Hireology has a rich company culture that’s clear with their What We Value section: “Create wow moments, Own the Result,”—anyone that’s been in contact with their team will see these values immediately, too.
LumenVox
Their employee headshots have a level of consistency with black and white treatment, keeping a unified visual for their bios. Additionally, their latest news is included at the bottom of the About Us page.
Why we love it: LumenVox’s latest news is always going to be cutting edge. After their updated website came through, their About Us page kept up along with it—offering the audience an inside look into the latest technology advancements they’re making.
IMO
Rolling the cursor over the leadership photos adds a touch of personality to the credibility of the leadership team at IMO. With bios on the longer side, they created separate pages for each executive team member.
Why we love it: Focusing on your leadership (and showing a little personality while you’re at it) can set the tone well for your professional relationships. The pro photography is a beautiful touch, too.
Solid Digital
We don’t want to say “save the best for last” but here’s the proof that we’re walking the walk. With our team page, we broke the conventional grid norm with different sized photos (along with some team photos sprinkled in) and we included a message from the CEO. We mixed in some “About Us” and some “Team” aspects, to create a page that was engaging and informative. Our All Hands meeting in Denver helped us gather our Portland and Chicago digital marketing teams in one place for an opportunity to professionally capture our team and our collaborative (find that value on the page!) spirit. A photographer came for a few hours during our Denver meetings to take candids and posed photos. And closer to the bottom of the page, we added in a bit of fun with our most recent High 5 comments from our Slack conversations.
Why we love it: This is the ultimate page for us to bring our combined personalities and team-focused company culture. And we’re proud of it.
