Researched & written by Destinie Dianne.
The Weekly Source 005

Research, resources, opportunities & ideas you don’t have time to find yourself.

There is a strange thing that happens when people have to write an About page.

Suddenly, everyone starts sounding the same.

I’m passionate about…

I’ve always believed…

My mission is to…

With years of experience…

All perfectly acceptable sentences.

And yet, after reading enough of them, they begin to blur together.

So for this week’s edition of The Weekly Source, I went looking for the opposite.

I read 50 About pages across personal websites, creative businesses, founder-led brands, portfolios, publications, agencies and independent creators.

I wanted to know:

What makes you actually want to keep reading about a person you’ve never met?

Not which website had the prettiest typography.

Not who had the most impressive résumé.

Not who had the longest list of accomplishments.

I was looking for the pages that made me understand the person or brand behind the website.

And there was a very noticeable difference between the forgettable ones and the ones I remembered after closing the tab.

Here is what the best ones did differently.

1. They didn’t start with a biography.

This was probably the biggest difference.

The weaker About pages tended to begin chronologically:

Destinie was born…

Or professionally:

I’m a writer and creative entrepreneur with experience in…

The stronger pages often started with an idea.

A belief.

A contradiction.

A sentence that made you curious.

Something like:

I spent years trying to choose one creative career before realizing I wasn’t supposed to.

Now I have a reason to continue.

Your About page doesn’t have to begin with who you are.

Sometimes it should begin with why I should care who you are.

2. They gave me a point of view.

The most memorable people weren’t necessarily the most accomplished.

They were the easiest to understand.

You knew what they believed.

You knew how they saw their industry.

You knew what frustrated them.

You knew what they wanted to change.

Compare:

“I help businesses create meaningful brands.”

with:

“I think too many beautiful brands are being built without anything meaningful underneath them.”

The first tells me what you do.

The second tells me how you think.

And increasingly, especially for personal brands, how you think is part of what people are buying.

Your perspective is intellectual property.

Put some of it on the page.

3. They told me something I couldn’t learn from LinkedIn.

This became one of my favorite tests.

If I can find every piece of information on your About page by looking at your LinkedIn profile, the page probably isn’t doing enough.

Your website gives you something LinkedIn doesn’t:

context.

You can tell me why you changed careers.

Why you started the company.

Why you care about this particular problem.

Why your work looks the way it does.

Why you disappeared for two years.

Why you started again.

Why this thing matters to you.

Credentials tell me you’ve done something.

Story tells me why.

4. They used specific details.

Generic writing disappears.

Specific writing creates pictures.

One person might say:

I’ve always been creative.

Another might say:

I was the kid turning school projects into magazines, rearranging my bedroom every three months and filling notebooks with ideas I had no idea what to do with.

The second version gives me a person.

This showed up repeatedly in the strongest About pages.

There were little details.

Cities.

Objects.

Childhood memories.

Unexpected jobs.

Failed ideas.

Strange beginnings.

Tiny moments that explained something bigger.

You don’t need to reveal your entire life.

You just need enough specificity to make your story feel lived instead of manufactured.

5. They weren’t afraid of personality.

Somewhere along the way, people learned that a professional website required removing every interesting thing about themselves.

Suddenly nobody has opinions.

Nobody is funny.

Nobody is strange.

Nobody has obsessions.

Nobody has a complicated career path.

Everybody is simply passionate about helping others.

The strongest About pages gave themselves permission to sound human.

The copy had rhythm.

Humor.

Warmth.

Confidence.

Occasionally weirdness.

And those little moments mattered because they answered an important question:

What would it actually feel like to know or work with this person?

Your personality isn’t something you add after the professional information.

For many personal brands, personality is part of the product.

6. They had a clear transformation.

This doesn’t have to be dramatic.

But memorable About pages usually contained movement.

I believed this → then this happened → now I believe this.

I worked here → noticed this problem → built this.

I struggled with this → learned this → now I help other people navigate it.

That movement gives the story structure.

Without it, an About page can become a collection of facts.

And facts aren’t necessarily a story.

The question isn’t only:

What happened to you?

It’s:

How did what happened change what you do now?

7. They connected the personal story to the work.

This is where a lot of About pages lose me.

There’s a beautiful personal story…

and then suddenly:

Anyway, here are my services.

The best pages created a bridge between the two.

The childhood obsession with magazines eventually became editorial design.

The terrible experience hiring an agency became the reason someone built a different kind of agency.

The years spent feeling invisible became an interest in storytelling.

The inability to find certain clothes became the beginning of a fashion brand.

Suddenly, the business doesn’t feel randomly attached to the person.

It feels inevitable.

The best founder stories make you understand why this person had to build this particular thing.

8. They knew what to leave out.

An About page is not an autobiography.

This might be the hardest part.

Your life contains hundreds of stories.

Your career contains dozens of experiences.

Your résumé contains years of information.

They don’t all belong here.

The strongest pages were edited.

They chose the experiences that supported the larger story.

A useful question:

If someone remembers only three things about me after leaving this page, what do I want those three things to be?

Write toward those.

Everything else has to earn its place.

9. They made accomplishments feel like evidence, not the entire personality.

Credentials still matter.

Awards matter.

Press matters.

Clients matter.

Education matters.

Numbers matter.

But the memorable pages didn’t make me dig through three paragraphs of achievements before discovering an actual person.

Instead, accomplishments supported the story.

They answered:

Why should I trust you?

without becoming:

Please be impressed by me.

There’s a difference.

A good About page balances:

humanity + credibility.

Too much humanity without credibility and I might like you but not trust you with the work.

Too much credibility without humanity and I might respect you but forget you.

The best pages gave me both.

10. They understood that the reader is secretly asking, “What does this have to do with me?”

Yes, your About page is about you.

But someone else is reading it.

And while they’re learning your story, they’re subconsciously looking for themselves inside it.

Maybe they’re asking:

Does she understand people like me?

Does this company believe what I believe?

Would I want to work with this person?

Can they solve my problem?

Do I trust them?

Do I want more of this?

The best About pages eventually turned the story outward.

They created a connection between:

who I am → what I believe → what I create → why it might matter to you.

That’s the bridge.

After 50 pages, I kept coming back to five things.

The memorable About pages had:

A hook.

Something made me want the next sentence.

A point of view.

I understood what this person believed.

Specificity.

There were details I could actually remember.

A transformation.

Something had changed between the beginning and the present.

A destination.

By the end, I knew what they wanted me to explore next.

That’s it.

Not an elaborate origin mythology.

Not 2,000 words.

Not a perfectly cinematic childhood.

Just enough story to make the person behind the website feel real.

If you’re staring at an empty WordPress page right now, try this:

1. The Hook

Start with a belief, unexpected fact, contradiction or short story.

2. Who You Are Now

Give me the one- or two-sentence version.

3. How You Got Here

Tell me the parts of your story that explain the work you’re doing today.

4. What You Believe

Show me your perspective.

5. What You Do

Introduce your work, company, creative practice or services.

6. Why You’re Qualified

Add relevant experience, results, education, press, clients or accomplishments.

7. Something Human

Give me one detail that doesn’t sound like it came from a résumé.

8. Where I Should Go Next

Don’t make me figure it out.

Invite me to:

Read your work.

View your portfolio.

Explore your services.

Shop the brand.

Join your newsletter.

Book a session.

Your About page should create another click.

Before publishing yours, ask:

• Does my first paragraph make someone curious?
• Can someone understand what I do quickly?
• Is there at least one specific detail they’ll remember?
• Does my personality actually appear in the writing?
• Have I explained why I care about this work?
• Is there a clear transformation or origin story?
• Does my personal story connect naturally to what I offer?
• Have I included enough credibility to establish trust?
• Did I remove details that don’t support the larger story?
• Can someone understand my perspective or philosophy?
• Does the page sound like me—or like “professional website copy”?
• Have I given the reader somewhere to go next?

I think we misunderstand About pages because of the name.

We assume the assignment is:

Tell people about yourself.

But that isn’t really the job.

The job is to give someone enough information to decide:

I want to know more about this person.

That’s different.

You don’t need to explain everything you’ve ever done.

You don’t need to prove every accomplishment.

And you definitely don’t need to flatten yourself into five safe paragraphs because you’re afraid personality will make you look less professional.

Give people a reason to remember you.

Give them a story.

Give them a perspective.

Give them one strange little detail they’ll still remember three tabs later.

Then give them somewhere to go next.

Because your About page isn’t supposed to be the end of your website.

It’s supposed to make someone curious enough to keep exploring it.

THE WEEKLY SOURCE

Research, resources, opportunities & ideas you don’t have time to find yourself.

Researched & written by Destinie Dianne.

See you in Issue 006.