Writing an honest about page when your site is still finding its voice
A fresh WordPress install sits there with its default greeting, "My Blog," like a placeholder tooth waiting to be replaced. Anyone landing on it will bounce. Writing an about page for a site that barely exists yet feels like introducing yourself at a Sydney housewarming when the boxes are still taped shut and the kettle has not yet been found.
Most writers reach for a template instead. They borrow the confident tone of bigger brands, drop in words like "passionate" and "innovative," and hope nobody notices the domain was registered last Thursday. The audience feels the fakeness straight away. Australians in particular have a finely tuned radar for corporate waffle. The kind of copy that gets a polite nod in a boardroom in Melbourne will earn eye rolls in a Brisbane café.
A better path is to write what is true, right now, even if the truth is short. An honest about page reads like a real person speaking. It admits the limits, sketches the direction, and invites the reader to come along for the ride. That kind of page does more for trust than any amount of polish.
The press release trap most about pages fall into
Many about pages read like miniature press releases. They lead with the founder's qualifications, list awards nobody has heard of, and finish with a stock photo of a team high-fiving in front of a whiteboard. The reader leaves knowing less about the actual site than when they arrived.
Australian freelancers fall into this habit often. The culture of "having a go" sits uneasily next to inflated self-promotion, and the mix of modesty and sales copy comes across as awkward. A Perth copywriter who claims to be a "thought leader in digital storytelling" on a site with three published posts is asking for trouble.
A reader who senses exaggeration will close the tab. A reader who senses honesty will stick around. The difference is rarely about vocabulary. It is about whether the words line up with the reality of the site. Padding cannot rescue a page that has nothing to pad.
Owning the gap instead of hiding it
The hardest part of writing this page early is admitting the story is still being written. New projects in Hobart or Darwin often have a single creator, no team page, and no clear revenue model. Pretending otherwise wastes space that could be used for something true.
Instead of filling the page with what the site is not yet, the writer can simply say so. Something like: "This is a new project. I am still figuring out what it will become. For now, it is a notebook for ideas about X." That sentence is short, honest, and more inviting than a wall of invented heritage.
Owning the gap also frees the writer from comparing the site to established competitors in Adelaide or Sydney. The goal is not to out-position a decade-old publication. The goal is to be legible and real, and to give the reader a reason to come back in three months when the story has grown.
Drafting the page in plain English
A workable honest about page has four short blocks: who is behind it, what the site covers, what it does not cover yet, and how to get in touch. Each block can be a paragraph. No clever headings or stock photography required, and no need to dress the language up for the sake of sounding bigger.
Plain English matters. Australian readers appreciate directness. If the site is about local history in Fremantle, say so in one sentence. If the site is a notebook for woodworking projects in a Brisbane garage, write that. The boring truth reads as confidence because the writer clearly believes in what they are doing.
Within the working draft, it helps to keep one link to a longer piece that explains the writer's thinking. A note pinned at https://the3percentsolution.org/ can anchor the page without turning the about copy into an essay. The link should feel like an aside, not a detour that pulls the reader away before they have finished the introduction.
Cutting the cliches your draft will collect
Every first draft collects phrases that belong in a brochure. Words like "passionate," "innovative," "cutting-edge," "thought leader," and "synergy" creep in because they sound grown-up. On a fresh site they sound borrowed from somewhere else.
The fix is not to delete them on sight but to ask what each phrase is actually claiming. If the claim is true, the writer should describe it in concrete terms. If the claim is empty, the phrase should go. An Australian carpenter in Brisbane who builds custom furniture out of a shed does not need the word "artisan." The reader can see that already from the photos and the projects.
A useful exercise is to print the draft and cross out every adjective that does not add a fact. The page that remains is usually half the length and twice as clear. Brevity is honest because it refuses to hide behind decoration.
Letting the about page grow with the site
An about page should not be carved in stone. As the site picks up readers, partnerships, or a second contributor, the page changes. A solo project that lands a regular guest writer in Melbourne is no longer a solo project. The page should reflect that shift rather than carrying a stale description for another year.
This is also where writers get lazy. They publish the page on day one and never touch it. Months later the site has evolved into something else, and the about page still claims it is "a fresh new voice in the Australian digital space" or similar fluff. Readers notice the mismatch and trust takes a knock.
Treat the page like a garden bed. Revisit it every few months. Update the gaps that have been filled, add the ones that have opened up, and prune the language that has stopped fitting. A page that breathes with the site is a page that stays honest, and stays worth reading. A habit that helps is to read the page aloud once a quarter. If a sentence sounds like a brochure, rewrite it. If a sentence sounds like the writer speaking over a flat white in a Surry Hills café, leave it. For a companion read, this mataneteta writeup expands on the rhythm of plain language in more detail.