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How to Write an “About Me” Page
Whether visitors are on your blog or your business website, they expect to find an “About Me” or “About Us” page. For a blog it offers credibility, and a way to get personal with your audience. With a business website it can enhance credibility, it can present a better picture about your core functions, SELL, and even help brand your company.
An About Me Page is More Important than You May Think
Taking a look at the stats from twelve random sites that I manage, I found the average site had 5.5% of all its pages views occurring on the About Me page. With business websites the About Us page can nearly account for 20% of all your traffic! The highest percentage I saw was actually 19%. Every site I looked at had traffic on the about page, even a humor site where I expected none. Visitors expect to find it, and will look for it.
The Ingredients of an About Me Page
When a visitor lands on an About Me page they expect to find certain core items. These same items can be expected for a business About Us page as well.
You want to state:
- Who you are – Name, where are you from, and basic company or personal history
- What you specialize at
- Why you think a relationship should be created
- A method to contact you
- Optional methods to find additional information about you or your company
The About Us page also makes a great place for a little self promotion. If you look at BWI’s About page you can see how I did it. The first three paragraphs cover the first four important items I listed. I state who I am, what I do, and how it could benefit the visitor. At the end I give a quick link to my contact page, and visitors expectations have been met.
To take advantage of all those visitors that land on a About Me page, I’ve also included a couple of paragraphs afterwards. The first is to drive the point that I am really trying to improve websites. I have experience, I am aware of many common mistakes that are made on websites. The second paragraph was made to address the most asked question I get. It’s about my usability analysis, and potential customers want to know more about what they can expect out of it.
I also include my Be There Be Square logo where I stress the four major issues that need to be addressed for a successful website. It’s a little self branding, and offers a little extra insight about me.
BWI has a new guest blogger! Please take the time to check out her profile and website. Guest Blogger, Amanda Vare.
Related
Organic Textures VS Photoshop Brushes and Grunge Fonts
With graphic design resources becoming increasingly available online, the allure to use them can be overwhelming. Talented designers from all over the world are consistently distributing new (and often free) graphic design tools – including, but not limited to, Photoshop brushes i.e., Splatter Brushes and grunge fonts with many of these often listed in various graphic design “trends” articles.
Yet there is a trap one can succumb to of following a trend and applying these resources to designs, without taking the time to perform proper analysis. As designers, we should always know what our intentions are – ask yourself what is the desired effect that you are looking to create? Your answer to this could very well illustrate to you that the fantastic (yes, they’re often brilliant) free brushes or fonts you just found are not right for that particular project.
Creating your own textures gives you the flexibility to view (and analyze) an example of an effect that you would like to achieve. Creating such things via a real, “tactile” method is far more natural and effective than the use of 100% computer tools and resources. Through the use of inks, brushes, sponges, ink droppers, charcoals, and so on, you can create a library of textures – ready to scan and convert into Photoshop masks. One of the things to be aware of is that different mediums and techniques will produce different effects, and half the fun is often through experimentation.
For example, if a poster print were run over by a car on a road, then the print would wear off in a certain way. If you were to take a sheet of white paper, lay this on the surface of the road, and then rub charcoal over the sheet, the result will be a texture that, when applied as a mask within Photoshop, emulates the effect. There are other benefits in committing to this time consuming work – make no mistake about it; it does take more time than downloading a plug-in or font! However, I personally feel that the benefits add more value to designs.
Take advantage of altering the pressure you apply, which is a wonderfully simple, natural aesthetic technique. Where you are using graphic elements together with words, you can now apply a consistent effect over the two. There are no doubt some excellent grunge fonts available online, however one major problem with using these becomes clear when a double letter is used (as seen in the graphic example below). If your intention is to create a vintage/worn look, then stay clear of these – nothing screams “Fake!” more than two letters used side-by-side that display identical ‘worn’ treatments.
Never stop trawling the net for resources – we can all use these for a great deal of projects. However, try to stay focussed, don’t be swept up by “trends”, and always be aware of your intentions and the natural options that are available to you.
By Manz
www.GritFX.com
BWI has a new guest blogger! Please take the time to check out her profile and website. Guest Blogger, Amanda Vare.
Related
WordPress New Post Button Needs to Go
OK WordPress team. I love your blogging software, but in the last update (2.8.6) you sneaked in silly button in the top right header that I do not like. You know the one, the drop down post controller button or whatever it is you want to call it. It’s out of place, it duplicates an already visible menu, and it doesn’t even include a link to the dashboard.
This Silly Button
So here is the button I am talking about.
So here is the problems I have with it. First, the left sidebar menu offers all of the options found in the very visible left sidebar.
Second, if you were to find a good area to put that button a logical starting place would be in a group of like items. All the items found in the left sidebar allow you to edit and create pages so that would be a good place to put it, but obviously you don’t need it there. If you look at it’s current location you will find it is now in a group of other menu items that have nothing to do with writing or editing a post. Top right is for logging out, and profile information.
Third problem I have with it is the items found in the drop down list itself. You could actually lose a draft if you use it incorrectly. For example, lets say you start writing a post. You want to upload a picture to it, and you mistakenly use that silly button because you saw that it has an upload link. Whoops, your post is now gone because you navigated away from it.
What really drives me nuts is the fact that its purpose appears to be a shortcut tool to commonly used functions. If this is the case, at least include a link to the dashboard. Better yet? Kill the dang thing, and hit delete.
BWI has a new guest blogger! Please take the time to check out her profile and website. Guest Blogger, Amanda Vare.
Related
Exclusive Concepts – Specializing in E-Commerce Marketing
So you just finished putting up your retail site, and it’s live. Yesterday you had a whopping twenty visitors, and made zero sales. You are obviously going to need some traffic. Do you know how you are going to get it?
Exclusive Concepts specializes in online marketing for e-commerce websites. They are by trade, a SEO company, and getting search traffic is one of the best ways to start getting that targeted traffic.
Specializing in E-Commerce Marketing
Getting targeted traffic is what it’s all about. When a visitor searches Google or another search engine for your product, obviously you want to be on top of the results. With a new site though, this is easier said than done, and it will take a SEO marketing professional to get you there.
Exclusive Concepts can help improve your search rankings, manage your pay per click campaigns, and help make sure your website is ready to convert the visitors that do show up.
Conversions
Something that I focus on is conversions, and on how well your site is ready to do that. What’s the point of marketing a website if it’s not optimized to perform. Exclusive Concepts will look at your sites on-page factors like its design, its on-site factors like credibility, and its merchandising factors making sure that visitors are landing on the right type of products that you have to offer.
Exclusive Concepts has several testimonials from some high profile websites so definitely worth your time to check out their service if you are ready to start a campaign.
Thank you goes to Exclusive Concepts, for supporting Best Web Image with this paid editorial.
BWI has a new guest blogger! Please take the time to check out her profile and website. Guest Blogger, Amanda Vare.
Related
Does Google Webmaster Tools Keyword Significance Provide Value?
A couple of days ago I posted, Google Webmaster Tools Now Has Keyword Significance. It was about how Google’s Webmaster Tool is now displaying a chart titled Keyword Significance. After I posted it, I received three comments, and just as many emails suggesting that it’s not clear what Keyword Significance is about.
Google’s Explanation of Keyword Significance
Here is what Google says the keyword significance list is for:
Below are the most common keywords Google found when crawling your site. These should reflect the subject matter of your site.
Google is basically looking at your website, sorting its content by the number of times each word was used, and revealing to you what keywords you use the most. It’s similar to a tag cloud, but instead of being all crazy looking like a cloud it just nicely organized.
If you click on any of the keywords they provide you, they indicate the number of times they were found, and where they found those keywords on your site. This can be very helpful if you are playing the keyword density game, but more importantly knowing how your site is seen by Google can sometimes be very enlightening.
Using Keyword Significance in an Example
Using this site as an example I found that the sixth most used word was “Post”. This website isn’t about a post or posts. Doing some quick on site research revealed, I often referenced other posts on the site with terms like next post, previous post, or popular post. Eliminating the unnecessary uses of the word will improve the way Google sees my site. Keyword density for more important words will now also rise up more. Now I just need to delete all those articles I wrote about on how to paint a white fence post.
Digging into the help that Google gives about Keyword significance, they mention two other reasons to check it often. Finding terms like Viagra as a top five term on a site about pianos for example, might indicate that someone has hacked your site.
Google also suggest making sure that the terms you expect to find are indeed there. If they are not, it means that it’s possible Google is not able to access your page or pages. If this is the case they then they suggest checking your Webmaster Tools for website crawl errors.
Understand Keyword Significance now? Has anyone found some unexpected results? Share it by commenting below!
BWI has a new guest blogger! Please take the time to check out her profile and website. Guest Blogger, Amanda Vare.
Related
Smiling Faces Bring Life to Your Website
Maybe it’s just me, but when I review websites I find I always seem to have a soft spot for websites with smiling faces. Last week I was asked to check out this Denver photo booth rentals website, and the first thing that catches my eye is the smiling faces. Maybe it’s the; see someone else smile, I smile factor. Regardless of why, this site nailed the essence of what they are trying to sell with smiling pictures.
It’s Not Really About the Booth
The website rents photo booths. Is that what they are really selling though? If you go to their home page, Denver Photo Booth Rentals, you will find 12 pictures, and only one of them is the actually photo booth.To sell their service they use not the booth itself, but the power of smiling faces. What they are really selling is happy memories, and their booth is the means to deliver that.
You can have this, if you rent the booth.
Smiling Credibility
In some ways a smiling face can even offer credibility to your website. Imagine this photo booth site with no pictures of people. I would think either boring, and I may possibly even question if people even rent the thing. It’s why pro bloggers often have pictures of themselves on their home page (I guess I should work on that for this site), and why it’s nearly impossible to find a major ecommerce site to not have people on it.
Imagine looking at a Toys-R-Us catalog that just showed the toys, and didn’t include any pictures of kids happily playing with those toys. Imagine getting a Macy catalog, and seeing only pictures of purses with no people holding them. It doesn’t happen. You almost have to include a picture of someone happily using your product or service.
Over a year ago I wrote a post about a my experience visiting 1,000 blogs. Pictures played a major roll, and here is the post:
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