Every part of your website plays an essential role. Unfortunately, e-commerce companies sometime treat their About Us page as the black sheep of the family, believing it to be less important than other pages. The result? They miss a vital opportunity to connect with customers and give them an inside look at company staff, brand personality, products and goals.

How can your business avoid this common mistake and create an About Us page that makes an amazing first impression? When professional content marketing services approach web design, they often focus on the following factors to create an unforgettable About Us page:

Essential Qualities of the Best About Us Pages

Successful About Us pages share several characteristics that enable them to reach visitors effectively:

• Clear: People don’t want to wade through walls of text, especially if they’re using a mobile device. Instead, main points should jump out at visitors in the first five seconds or so.
• Honest: Readers tend to ignore marketing speak that sounds the same as every other company. What they really want to know is what your company stands for.
• Powerful: The About Us page should help people experience your brand, not just read text. Striking images, curious fonts and gorgeous graphics help you make a bold statement.
• Unique: Wow readers immediately with distinctive elements such as humor, thought-provoking quotes or artistic designs.
• Engaging: Great About Us content motivates potential clients to action by highlighting your expertise or showing them how you can make their lives easier.
• Friendly: Professionalism is important, but so is being friendly. Visitors need to like you, either because of what you stand for, such as charitable giving or eco-friendly programs, or because of your company’s innovative or quirky attitude.

Here are 10 businesses that put digital content marketing to work in creating distinctive About Us pages, providing awesome inspiration for business owners everywhere:

1. Walmart

What We Love:

Short, sweet and easy-to-read, Walmart’s About Us page is packed with interesting, helpful tidbits. It’s a prime example of how to condense large amounts of company data into a single paragraph.

2. BMW

What We Love:

Statistics immediately demand attention, even before visitors know what they’re for. BMW also includes detailed information further down the page, but it’s the bold numbers that interest people in reading more.

3. Google

What We Love:

When it comes to projecting a friendly personality, Google is king. How does this enormous corporation, with 247 million visitors and worth over 790 billion dollars, manage to feel so down-to-earth? Notice how effectively this page pairs energetic brand colors with a spacious layout and clear mission statement. Google wisely uses a first-person voice — “we” and “our” — in its content for an especially human touch.

4. Nestlé

What We Love:

In addition to relaxing graphics and positive colors, Nestlé states its company goals in a clear and engaging way. By emphasizing concrete figures using bolded text instead of generalized statements, this becomes the definition of a powerful About Us page.

5. Twitter

What We Love:

In just one sentence, Twitter manages to grab the attention of visitors, make a brand statement and deliver a hip vibe that appeals to mind and heart. This is such a great example of effective marketing that it could easily adorn a t-shirt for Twitter fans.

6. Ferrari

What We Love:

One of the main purposes of an About Us page is to tell a story about your company. Here, Ferrari masterfully weaves its history through a sleek paragraph and enticing photograph that adds a touch of vintage elegance. Inviting the reader to click to find out more is much more effective than a huge wall of text crowding the page.

7. Foreign Cinema

What We Love:

San Francisco’s Foreign Cinema attracts couples with luxurious open-air dining, exquisite food and romantic films projected during dinner. The restaurant’s About Us page relies heavily on impactful visuals to allow site visitors to imagine themselves in the scene. Both the font chosen and the black background offer readers easy-to-understand information while infusing significant elegance.

8. Lonely Planet

What We Love:

Humans are naturally attracted to bright colors, bold visuals and moving objects. Lonely Planet does an amazing job of splitting up page information into delicious morsels. Large headings inform people what to expect, and then a short paragraph explains further. The constantly moving graphics on the right-hand side brighten the page immensely and entice readers to follow onsite links.

9. Lagunitas Brewing Company

What We Love:

While the page intro for Lagunitas Brewing Company in Chicago is a little long for our tastes, where the eclectic brewery really nails things is its “Our Story” video. Professional and intimate, this video immerses viewers in the company’s vision and feels like having a conversation directly with its founder.

10. WebMD

What We Love:

A great About Us page should be a springboard to other parts of your website. WebMD’s site tackles this challenge elegantly by first showing how it can improve readers’ lives and then showcasing attention-grabbing headlines. These colorful images and interesting titles practically guarantee visitors will stick around to check out an article or two.

How To Design an Engaging About Us Page

The goal of a good About Us page is to represent your brand identity in an interesting and attractive way. Here are a few places you can start:

• Mission statement
• Awards and certifications
• History of the company or founders
• Current and future goals
• Team profiles

It’s often useful to call out two or three short sections dedicated to your brand’s greatest strengths, such as products or qualities that define you or set you apart. Try to keep all information as clear and concise as possible, and make ample use of multimedia tools such as videos, photographs, project portfolios, infographics and positive client testimonials. To structure additional content and keep pages uncrowded and visually attractive, many companies create an About Us section on their sitemap that utilizes different pages for reviews, contact information, company history and employee bios.

Whether you have an in-house web design department or buy articles from digital content marketing creators, make sure to give your website’s About Us page the attention it deserves. You’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by increased site traffic and longer page visits as a result.