On the web you can’t communicate with customers and partners face to face. However you still can influence them with your website design and content. The home page of your website is like a new suit that attracts attention. It generates a client’s interest in your business, but for them to make a decision on whether or not to deal with your company, they need to know more about you.

That’s what the About Us page is for, to give them detailed and engaging information about yourself.

Question is: is your About Us page good enough to engage people?

Recommended Reading: 7 Types of "Coming Soon" Page Design (With Examples)

The Necessity Of The About Us Page

The About Page is a powerful tool to reach your target audience. Site owners should go ahead and use it like the many companies that do to communicate with their visitors. It’s not a secret that a lot of designers prefer creating home pages of websites, while neglecting minor pages. The problem is, the About Us page is not a minor page.

Most of the efforts in a web design is aimed at dealing with clients to make a profit. But how will you make visitors trust you if your About Us page looks weird? Remember that potential customers would like to know as much as possible about you and your business.

Nobody wants to trust their money with unprofessional and unknown organizations. Having a good About Us Page is a crucial component of success.

Who Reads Your About Us Page?

It’s not an idle curiosity, there are several types of readers who will want to find out more from your About Us page:

Potential clients and partners

Whether you work on B2B or B2C markets, you need to get new customers from time to time. For those who wonder who is behind the website, your About Us page is the first source of information.

Job seekers

If you care about getting good, professional staff you need to give them proper information online. Most likely before sending you a job application, a lot of professionals would like to check you out. If you don’t want to lose out on creative designers, marketers and developers, don’t resort to blah-ing on your About Us Page.

Instead, show off the photos of your office, your corporate perks and hangouts and other stuff like that.

Investors and donors

Would you like somebody to come and give you their money? If you’re looking for investments you should be ready to fight for them. In this competition a well thoughtout About Us page will give you a lot of additional points.

Your competitors

A little bit of spying is ok on every online and offline market; it’s called intelligence gathering. To stay up to date you need to know what your competitors have just done and what they are working on. It’s a competition.

In this play your About Us page is your business card that makes competitors know your worth and respect you more.

Ideas for an Effective About Us Page

Forget about wordy stories. People are not interested in reading huge chunks of text. Viewers may look through your history, but more likely they won’t stick around for long. Time is of the essence. Give a clear explanation of what you do.

A lot of business websites fail to describe their goods and services, leaving visitors trying to understand what the website was created for.

Give people a reason to work with you preferably a cool reason. Do you have testimonials from previous customers or partners? Use them! They will add more value to your business info. Other aspects include:

1. Mission and vision

A lot of people will be eager to work with you only if your values coincide with those of their own. Showing your corporate mission and vision means you state your priorities clear. It helps you make the perfect business match early on in the game.

2. Staff Personalization

If you create a portfolio where you are the only star you need to identify yourself. It will reduce the distance between you and potential clients. In the case where there is a team of professionals behind the site, go ahead and put up personal facts; that would suit the About Us page just fine.

Group photos, personal portraits, interesting facts, positions – all these things will help you build trust in business relationships.

3. Photos and Images

Use photos and images to make your About Us page fun. Original graphics and professional photos attract more attention as opposed to a plain text. On this page you shouldn’t use pictures of bad quality or abuse stock photos. People will notice that the photos are not yours and you’ll look bad. The photos overuse can harm your design and your reputation.

Read Also: Large Background Images In Web Design: Tips And Examples

4. Use Keywords

Choose 1-2 words or phrases and optimize the page for them. It will be easy to do because when you’re talking about something you’ll naturally name it several times (but don’t overdo it).

5. Internal links

After the previous Google Penguin update website owners started taking a lot of care of their link profiles. Blind link-building doesn’t work anymore. When writing about yourself or your business, link to your Contacts page, Portfolio page, social media accounts, etc.

Don’t paste these links just because somebody says you have to. Make them look natural and user-friendly.

Showcase

Now let’s see how great your business can look on the Web. A lot of websites have already built adorable About Us pages, which showcases not just their vision but also their personality. Pick one that resonates with your own and adopt their practices with ease.

Google

MailChimp

Behance

Yellow Leaf

Less Films

Eight Hour Day

Duoh

Pulp Fingers

Doberman

Joe Payton

Mostly Serious

Pursuit

Moz

Letters

Emma

Reflection

You have probably noticed that all the shown About Us pages look different. There are no strict rules for their creation, but you can always look at your competitors’ designs to decide on which elements you should be paying attention to.

Hopefully this post will give you a better vision of your future About us design. Cheers and good luck!

Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Karen Clark, who has been writing about personal security topics for the better part of a decade for SecurityChoice.com. She has a special interest in the emergence of online threats to personal security, especially attacks that focus on people rather than technology.

Like any communication line, Facebook is unfortunately prone to knots and tangles. While the company employs some of the best and brightest computer scientists, businesspeople and modern polymaths, it’s impossible to avoid a few security breaches when they’re manning a network that covers Facebook’s nearly inconceivable digital expanse.

Since shedding its reputation as a college-orientated network and ascending to the status of mainstream media fixture, Facebook has fallen victim to an assembly of attacks committed by anyone and everyone, from profit-mongering Russian collectives to rogue American vagabonds.

Recommended Reading: 20 Things Savvy Facebookers Should Know (By Now)

Here are the five attacks you need to know about, and what you can do to protect yourself against them or future similar attacks.

1. Koobface

Probably the most well-known of the Facebook cons, in part because of its anagrammatic title, Koobface reached its height of virulence in 2009. Koobface commonly implants itself by masquerading on your newsfeed as a must-see viral video.

Upon clicking the video, users are prompted with an offer to download the latest version of flash player – in reality, it’s a worm in disguise. Once it’s installed, the cybercriminal who built the worm is given remote access to your computer, allowing him or her a front row seat for all your most sensitive digital information.

Safeguard Yourself

To avoid this frightening prospect, be particularly careful in what you download from social media networks, and keep your anti-virus software updated so it can detect the most recent strains of Koobface.

Read Also: Top 10 Security Tools For Your Smartphone

2. Zeus

Much like Koobface, Zeus works under the assumption that people will click links disguised as fan pages, social shares and even friend profiles. Again, once users click a link, they’re prompted to install malware which sits dormant on your system until you access your bank account, at which point it makes a copy of your username and password.

Safeguard Yourself

As a Web-wide policy, experts recommend bookmarking select websites that handle your personal information and have a long history of reliable account protection.

That way, you can stack up the website you’re intending to visit against the website you know you can trust, and make sure the domains match without a letter, number or slash to spare.

3. Likejacking

Likejacking scams have been known to hover around Facebook for months at a time before they’re stomped out. But the problem is once one goes down, another pops up.

And all of them follow a simple formula:

1. Use a juicy, sensational title for a fake article (e.g. "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE" or "The Prom Dress That Got This Girls Suspended From School.")
2. Wait for users to "like" the article title in order to gain access to its non-existent content
3. Re-post itself on your newsfeed
4. Repeat.

While the process isn’t particularly harmful – just annoying – it’s never a good idea to put yourself in the way of any likejacking programs. Since they typically lead out to spammy websites, residual viruses and infections are always a possibility.

Safeguard Yourself

Keep a keen eye for any article shares that seem too ridiculously titled to be true, and use a significant bit of discretion before you click the like button.

4. Facebook Black

Last March, the Facebook Black scam spread itself across the social web by promising users an alternate blacked-out appearance for Facebook’s home screen.

(Source: news.softpedia.com)

Of course, in the same malicious spirit of all the other viruses on this list, the black template is really a front for an obnoxious duo of JavaScript files.

If installed, the files lead to an influx of bothersome surveys. Additionally, the bug automatically perpetuates itself by setting up a promotional page on your account to dupe your friends into clicking the very same link.

Safeguard Yourself

If you’re infected, make sure you remove the files immediately – often times they’re nested in a Google Chrome extension, which allows for a quick uninstall.

And always be sure to do some research before you download any type of add-on or extension that supposedly ‘modifies your Facebook experience’. Sometimes, they’re legitimate. But too many times, they’re bogus.

5. Who Viewed Your Profile?

Facebookers are a curious bunch. That’s why there’s a certain allure to figuring out who viewed your profile in a given day. While that option has never been open to Facebook users, there have been plenty of scammers willing to exploit that desire.

Hackers have crafted a number of advertisements for fake Facebook applications which are supposed to give insight into who’s looking at your profile. Like Facebook Black, these advertisements are bunk, and regularly lead to browser extension downloads. Once you’ve installed the extension, hackers can get quick, easy access to the personal information stored on your account.

Safeguard Yourself

Precautionary tales indicate that Facebook users should refrain from clicking URLs that look too short to be normal. Also, make it a regular routine to check through your Facebook apps and determine which ones are real and which ones you’ve never used – the sleeping apps could be connected to malware.

Conclusion

While no one claims virulent activity to be a good thing for Facebook’s general health, there’s a thin silver lining through it all. With each attack, Facebook learns more about the fissures in its code. And with each attack, Facebook finds a way to patch itself, and rebuild stronger, better and more secure.

To aid the process, it’s up to us to spray an extra coat of diligence on our online decision making processes. The more responsible we are with our online activity – particularly with what we click and who we trust – the less likely these viruses are to stain the fabric of our valued social networks.

We all need breaks from work once in a while to take the stress off our shoulders, and what better way to relax than to read a few funny tweets. If you are an avid follower of a tweeting good time, you really should follow these 20 accounts. Be advised, your sense of humor may vary.

(Image source: Light-Schizophrenia)

We’ve found some of the wackiest parody Twitter accounts of celebrities where they tweet the most nonsensical and funny stuff. Remember that you can put these accounts into a ‘comedy’ list on Twitter so that everything else is filtered out for you to enjoy. Also, recommend your favorite tweet tracks to follow or listen to.

Recommended Reading: How To Listen To Your Tweets With The Social Radio

@Lord_Voldemort7

You don’t have to be a Harry Potter fan to enjoy the tweets of ‘he who must not be named’. He tweets about hashtags that are trending on Twitter with a small Harry Potter reference. Other times he adds some Dark Lord evil into it. Sometimes it work, other times you chuckle. [Followers: 2.2 million]

You don’t have to say ‘lumos’ to turn me on. #HarryPotterPickupLines

— The Dark Lord (@Lord_Voldemort7) June 8, 2013

@ItsBadluckBrian

An internet meme brought to the world of Twitter. If you don’t already know about bad luck Brian, the fictional character goes through scenarios that backfire on him. The harsh outcome of his actions shown through tweets are outright funny, and almost always sad. [Followers: 417k]

Checks Facebook on his birthday. 1 notification. Farmville.

— Bad Luck Brian (@ItsBadLuckBrian) July 8, 2013

@BettyFckinWhite

Betty White is a TV personality that most of the younger generation might not know about, but should. She’s an actress and comedian who has been in the industry for 65 years, and this parody account brings her out of control and outrageous sense of humor into Twitter. [Followers: 116k]

Happy Birthday to Larry David and Lindsay Lohan. Both turn 66 today.

— Betty F*ckin’ White (@BettyFckinWhite) July 2, 2013

@chuck_facts

Chuck Norris can do some of the most outrageous things a human being can do like counting to infinity, twice. This Twitter account with superhuman facts of Chuck Norris will keep you entertained. Its ridiculous one liners could (maybe) inspire you to be great too. [Followers: 238k]

Chuck Norris once defeated an entire army with nothing but a Teletubby.

— Chuck Norris (@chuck_facts) June 22, 2013

@ConanOBrien

Late night TV host Conan O’Brien is ranked among the top 100 accounts with the most Twitter followers – you can form a country with his followers. The comedian’s tweets are a bit crude just the way his followers like it. [Followers: 8.5 million]

I’ve found that "So, are any of you losers verified on Twitter?" is not a great icebreaker at dinner parties.

— Conan O’Brien (@ConanOBrien) June 24, 2013

@OhWonka

This account is from the birth of the internet meme Condescending Wonka where he tweets of things that would insult your intelligence, condescendingly. Follow at your own risk. [Followers: 644k]

I love that super cute thing you do where you don’t text me back for hours, adorable.

— Condescending Wonka (@OhWonka) July 6, 2013

@DeathStarPR

‘Public Relations’ for the Death Star… whoever thought of that is a genius. This creative account talks about everyday problems and how to solve them the Jedi way. Other tweets include making fun of Stormtroopers and Star-Wars-related jokes. [Followers: 255k]

Remember, if someone annoys you, it only takes ten muscles to smile at them. And zero muscles to Force choke them to death.

— Death Star PR (@DeathStarPR) July 5, 2013

@FirstWorldPains

Another internet meme brought to life. You have definitely come across and can relate with some of these ‘pains’ at one time or another. Most are funny, some are (ridiculously) true. [Followers: 739k]

I have a nice DSLR Camera and I know how to use it, but nobody will comment on my photos unless I put instagram-style filters on them

— First World Pains (@FirstWorldPains) July 9, 2013

@WolfpackAlan

Alan Garner is a character from the movie "The Hangover". His Twitter handle ‘Wolfpack’ is based on happenings in the movie but his tweets aren’t. And they are flat out hilarious. [Followers: 936k]

If your heart was broken, you’d be dead, so shutup.

— Alan Garner (@WolfpackAlan) July 10, 2013

@Lmao

Many know that LMAO is internet speak for Laughing My Ass Off, and this is what this Twitter account tries to achieve with its tweets. So follow it for lots of LOL moments (and so true moments) through its content. [Followers: 2.1 million]

I don’t care how much pain you are in, if you hurt yourself in a hilarious way, I’m laughing.

— Funny Tweets! (@Lmao) July 8, 2013

@TheTweetOfGod

Ever wondered what God would say if he had Twitter? He fixes sports matches, gives you tips on how to be happy and has a beef with America, Canada and atheists. Don’t follow if you can’t take the naked truth. [Followers: 822k]

The wise man chooses his words carefully, while the fool says stupid shit.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) July 1, 2013

@kellyoxford

This is not a parody account. Kelly Oxford is a Canadian screenwriter, social media blogger and parent. She’s popular and has many followers due to her funny, down-to-earth tweets, some revolving around parenting. [Followers: 531k]

Scary to think that my kids could become adults who mix up your/you’re and I’ll have wasted 20 yrs because I have to kill them.

— kelly oxford (@kellyoxford) June 30, 2013

@MensHumor

Men, can’t live with them, can’t live without them; them clear, honest advice is all you will need. Follow to find out what men normally do and say. [Followers: 2.6 million]

OK fatties…they’re called "skinny jeans"…not "makes you skinny jeans".

— Men’s Humor (@MensHumor) July 9, 2013

@carellquotes

Fans of the popular US TV series, The Office, would remember the darnest things that Michael Scott says during his time there. This Twitter account is dedicated to his awesome and embarrassing character where you’ll find some of his memorable quotes The Office. [Followers: 25k]

I have got to make sure that YouTube comes down to tape this. #theoffice

— Michael Scott (@carellquotes) June 19, 2013

@itsBroStinson

Barney Stinson is a character of the TV series How I Met Your Mother. Anyone who watches it will know that Barney is an epicly cool character that always wants to have fun. Although it’s a parody account, tweets here are so like him it is as if he’s manning this Twitter account personally. [Followers: 278k]

Don’t do anything you’re not prepared to explain to a paramedic.

— Barney Stinson (@itsBroStinson) July 9, 2013

@itsWillyFerrell

Will Ferrell has starred in many comedic movies, this parody account of him really depicts his funny personality. There’s a lot of crude humor on his Twitter bound to make your mind pause, load, then get stitches from laughing too hard. [Followers: 1.3 million]

There is a fine line between having a tan, and looking like you rolled around in bunch of Doritos.

— Not Will Ferrell (@itsWillyFerrell) July 8, 2013

@ShitNobodySays

Ever heard someone say "I can’t wait for exams!"? Nope. This account is filled with things that no one ever says, such as… [Followers: 746k]

I look so hot when I sneeze.

— Shit Nobody Says (@ShitNobodySays) July 3, 2013

@TheBatman

Gotham’s saviour also has a parody Twitter account. Read this in Batman’s coarse and angry voice to get with the program. [Followers: 462k]

It’s a good year when Gotham fireworks don’t explode into a giant smile that rains toxins on the crowd. Still, it’s a little disappointing.

— The Batman (@TheBatman) July 5, 2013

@WomensHumor

The women who follow this account would agree to almost everything tweeted, while men who follow could learn a few things. Either way, it’s funny and refreshing, and worth following if you want to survive the female species. [Followers: 1.2 million]

Don’t get between a woman and her chocolate.

— Women’s Humor (@WomensHumor) July 2, 2013

@big_ben_clock

Ben here announces what time it is by the number of bongs. So deep. [Followers: 423k]

BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG

— Big Ben (@big_ben_clock) July 8, 2013