Come on in, Mr. Client. Have a seat.
I wanted to have a word with you about your website. You know, the massive data structure that combines text, audio, video and images all in the pursuit of explaining what it is you do and how your customers can find you. Yeah, that thing.
Does it not strike you as wholly silly to have an “About Us” page on such a thing? Isn’t the entire site, you know, about you? Is there something you really need your audience to know about you that isn’t somewhere else on the site? And is that a good idea?
Some conventions of the Internet exist almost completely without cause. They’re just things we’ve grown accustomed to seeing and feel weird about not having. The “About Us” page is top of that list, in my opinion. Unless you run something like a media site – and maybe not even then – there is nothing about you that doesn’t deserve equal time with the rest of your marketing content. In fact, your marketing content should be shot through with all those most important things about you that make you different. Or special. Or just happy to be alive. But it doesn’t belong on one lonely page that nobody will bother with.
Frequently, when designers I work with spec out pages, I’ll tell them to just kill the About Us page. Make an About link in the navigation if you have it, but link that to the front page. Why waste the effort on a vestigial page?