Five Simple Ways to Improve an AboutUs Page

So you’ve seen the value in investing a little time and energy on your site’s AboutUs wiki page. Now what?

In all types of wikis, we often see folks who have something of value to contribute but just need a few ideas to jump-start their efforts. If you’re feeling that way in regards to our community, here are five things you can do to create a more comprehensive, effective, and attractive page on AboutUs.

Part I: Add a Summary

You can make your huge difference just by adding a Summary that captures the essence of your site. Summaries are a relatively new feature on AboutUs (see our announcement from January), but it has quickly become a key component of the site.

Why is a Summary important?

A Summary is the first thing anyone will see when they visit the page, and any keywords contained within it are a vital part of the searchability of your AboutUs page (and by extension, your site). A poor Summary can discourage our readers from browsing the rest of your page or visiting your site, and improper or unrelated keywords within can hurt your SEO.

Adding a Summary

The good news is that unlike some wiki features, a Summary is ridiculously easy to edit. Since they’re added with a JavaScript widget and not WikiText markup, editing is just like a word processor (though no formatting is generally necessary). The image below is how an AboutUs page lacking a Summary will appear. To add one, simply click the green highlighted text; a page with a Summary already in place will have a pencil icon to click in order to edit. While “is” is automatically included in unwritten Summary sections, you can remove this if you like.

Click the green text to add a Summary to a page without one.

What makes a good Summary?

Even if your article on AboutUs already has a Summary, you can still revise it, just like any other part of the site. Whether you’re rewriting yours or adding a new one, an effective Summary does two things:

1. Captures the essence of your site and organization for readers, especially for those unfamiliar with it.
2. Favors clear, constructive explanation over loose value statements.

The following is the Summary for Mozilla.org’s AboutUs page. This is a decent example of a Summary in that is clearly states what The Mozilla Project does for unfamiliar readers, and prompts readers to investigate more about the site and it’s work. It also states what they do in a way that isn’t obscured by value statements. While AboutUs does not require the neutrality of Wikipedia, we do like things to be constructive. While your site or organization may very well be “the best” or “cool,” such subjective general descriptors can obscure the core of your business.

The Summary for Mozilla.org

This next examples is from the CreativeCommons.org page on AboutUs. While fair, this Summary isn’t quite the best it could be, and it demonstrates a key point: a Summary is not a tagline. While the example below is good in that it is clearly related to Creative Commons, it fails to tell unfamiliar readers that it is a copyleft licensing system and a non-profit organization.

The Summary for CreativeCommons.org

Hopefully this has been a helpful introduction to what we consider an important and easy first step in improving an AboutUs page. For Part II, look for information about our tagging system, Topics.

Tagged as: how to, tips, tricks, Tutorial, wiki editing