When I want to evaluate the overall “style” on a website, the best place to start is the “About Us” page, which typically includes biographical information about the principals: CEO, president, CFO, COO, founder, provost, and so on. The “About Us” page is a place to really shine, to present you and your company or organization in the very best light possible. If the content writer has hit the mark in that material, I’m fairly sanguine about the rest of the website. Alas, most of the time, the “About Us” page looks like it was written by an 11-year-old.
The main issue is continuity, and the first issue is what to say. Material has to be presented identically, bio after bio after bio. The same general outline should be followed for each person.
Here’s how to organize an effective biography. There are basically three required steps and an optional fourth and fifth.
1. Specify the person’s current title.
2. Tell where he or she came from, business-wise, with special emphasis on where that person was (professionally) before joining the company. This is the place to list the person’s accomplishments: the books, articles, speeches, and so on, that pre-date him or her taking this particular position.
3. Describe what he or she does at the company. And, optional:
4. Give a one-sentence description of two or three hobbies and interests.
5. Give a one-sentence description of that person’s family life.
If you have several biographies to write, vary the order of the information up a bit. For example, you could rotate with this order:
1. A description of current position and responsibilities.
2. Professional background.
3. Educational background.
4. Hobbies.
5. Family.
Once the material has been written, go back over it and look for typos. Take a look at this biographical material:
He runs Product Strategy and Corporate Development at XYZ, a marketing software company based in Cambridge, MA. At XYZ Brad is responsibile for strategic planning, pricing & packaging and corporate development. Additionally, Brad focuses on the design of XYZ’s business processes and operational metrics.
Prior to joining XYZ Brad was a consultant concentrating on operational innovation at PRM.
Brad holds an MBA from MIT Sloan where he is an occassional guest lecturer as part of the new enterprises curriculum. He also holds a B.A. in Computer Science from Amherst College.
When a biography has typos in it—and this one has two—people look stupid. Let’s face it: “two typos” and “Amherst” are words that should never be in the same sentence.
[Full disclosure: when I contacted this guy, the content was corrected. (But, you could ask, why were there two typos in it in the first place?)]
If you do “go there” with hobbies and personal information, please be careful what you say. If you have an aversion to hangnails (yes, I actually saw this on a bio), please don’t share that on your bio page. Sure, it’s absolutely hilarious, a real yuk-fest (not to mention yuck-fest), but do you really want people to think “there’s that idiot who hates hangnails!” every time they see your photo? Using trendy words, sounding like you are about 16—these are things to avoid in a professional, business-oriented, last-forever setting.
Once continuity of overall content has been established as far as the information that is displayed, it’s time to look at continuity within the material—academic degrees, lists of accomplishments, capitalization, punctuation—which I will talk about in Parts II and III.
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