I rewrote my FAQ page more times than any other page on this site. Not because the questions changed much — people ask roughly the same things about how I work, what I take on, whether I move fast or slow — but because I kept catching myself writing answers for search engines instead of for the person actually reading them.
That's an easy trap. An FAQ page looks like the lowest-stakes real estate on a website. A few questions, some short answers, maybe an accordion so it doesn't take up too much space. It reads as formality — the section you add because sites are supposed to have one, not because you have something to say.
I don't think that's true, and the longer I've worked on this practice, the more I've come to think the FAQ page is actually one of the more honest pieces of writing on a site. It's the place where you can't hide behind the polish of a case study or the ambiguity of a mission statement. Someone is asking a direct question — do you work quickly or deliberately, are you open to undefined projects, what should I know before reaching out — and you either answer it plainly or you don't.
At Aether, where I do this same work at a studio scale, I wrote recently about treating FAQs as a content system — structured, reusable, governed, tied to review dates and owners so an answer stays accurate as a site grows around it. I see the same pattern at Capte: the same technical answer about a piece of fleet hardware gets written slightly differently on a spec sheet, a support page, and a sales deck, and nobody notices until a customer does. That's the right way to think about it when you're maintaining answers across dozens of pages, whether they're client sites or product materials. But my own site doesn't have that problem. It has one voice, one person answering, and no distance between the question and the truth of it. So the discipline here isn't structural. It's just not flinching.
That's harder than it sounds. The instinct, especially after a few years of thinking about search behavior and how answers get surfaced, is to write for legibility to a machine — short, scannable, keyword-shaped. And there's a version of an FAQ page that does that well and says almost nothing. "What kind of projects do you take on?" answered with "I take on a wide range of design and development projects across industries" is technically an answer. It's also nothing anyone needed to ask, because it doesn't tell you anything about how I actually decide.
So the rule I settled on, for this site at least, was to only answer the questions I'd actually want to be asked — the ones where the honest answer says something true about how I work, even when the true answer is a little inconvenient. "Is there a formal process, or is it more flexible?" got the answer it deserved: there's structure, but it's quiet. Not a five-step methodology graphic. Just an admission that the structure exists mostly so I don't have to think about it, which frees up the thinking for the actual problem.
I think this is a design decision as much as a writing one, and it's not that different from the systems thinking I care about in interfaces generally. A good FAQ page, like a good onboarding flow or a good error state, is a moment where the system has to reveal something about its own logic. You can paper over that moment with reassuring, vague language, or you can use it to actually build trust — to show someone how the thing works before they've committed to anything. The Navy taught me a version of this a long time before I was doing it in design software: the moments people remember aren't the polished procedures, they're the plain, direct answers given under a little bit of pressure.
None of this means every FAQ needs to be a confession. Plenty of questions just need a clear, short, useful answer, and I try to give those too — that's still the majority of the page. But I've started treating the FAQ section as a kind of pressure test for the rest of the site's voice. If I can't answer a direct question honestly and briefly, that's usually a sign the surrounding copy is overwritten somewhere else, dressing up something that should just be said plainly.
So: fewer questions than I used to have, shorter answers than I used to write, and a much lower tolerance for anything that reads like it was written to satisfy a search algorithm instead of a person. The page is smaller now. I think it's also the most honest thing on the site.