Three pages I keep redesigning

On every site the studio ships, three pages are noticeably harder to get right than the rest. The hard pages are not the ones the brief usually highlights. They are the ones nobody mentions until the launch is six weeks away.

The About page.

The About page is the single page where the company is being asked to write about itself, and it is the page where companies most reliably fail to write something useful. The default About page is a paragraph of company history, a list of leadership headshots, and a generic statement of values that could be lifted from any other company in the same category.

The About page that works is the page that answers, specifically, the questions a sceptical reader is actually asking. Why was this company started. What do they do that the competition does not. Who is responsible if the work goes wrong. Where are they based. How long have they been doing this. The company’s strongest answers to these questions are usually buried somewhere in the founder’s head and have never been written down. The About page is where they get written down.

The Contact page.

Most contact pages are a form, an email address, a phone number, and a map. Almost none of them tell the user what to expect after submitting the form. How long until someone replies. Who replies. Whether the reply is human or automated. What kinds of enquiry the company is and is not interested in.

The contact page that works is the contact page that closes the loop. “We reply to every enquiry within three working days. The first reply is from a person, not a bot. We are not currently taking on web design clients with budgets under £8,000.” The user knows what they are agreeing to before they fill in the form.

The 404 page.

Already written about elsewhere on this site. Worth restating: the 404 page is the page the user lands on when they were trying to be somewhere else, and most 404 pages do not even acknowledge this. A useful 404 page suggests where the user might have meant to go, lets them search, and shows the most recent posts. Most 404 pages do none of these.

The pattern across all three: the hard pages are the pages where the company is being asked to be specific about something it has been getting away with being vague about. The studios that handle these pages well are the studios that have learned to ask the company those questions and not stop asking until there are real answers.

The pattern is also why these pages are the studio’s perpetual redesign list. The marketing pages on a small-business site can be redesigned every few years and are not, in general, getting worse over time. The About, Contact, and 404 pages drift faster and need attention more often, because they are the pages most directly connected to whatever the company is currently being vague about.

A useful exercise, for anyone running a small site: re-read these three pages once a quarter. Ask whether they still answer the questions a sceptical reader is asking. The answer, most quarters, will be no. The honest version of the redesign list always starts here.

Two reference About pages I keep open: Basecamp’s About page (specific, opinionated, nothing generic) and Pentagram’s About (short, plainly written, no padding). Two reference Contact pages: 37signals’ Contact (closes the loop on what to expect) and Studio Dumbar’s (sets explicit project criteria).