Team pages on a small business site

When a team page earns its place

When the customer will deal with a specific person and wants to know who. Professional practices, trades entering homes, and any service where the relationship is the product all benefit clearly.

When credentials matter. A page showing who holds which qualification, issued by whom, answers a question that would otherwise require a phone call or be quietly assumed.

And when trust is the barrier. Our page on trust signals covers why a named person with a face is one of the strongest signals available to a small business.

When to skip it

When it exists to look bigger. A team page listing two people under the heading Our Team is not deceptive, and a page padded with a designer who does occasional work and a relative who answers the phone is heading that way.

When the people change frequently. A team page is the fastest-ageing page on a business site, and one listing somebody who left eighteen months ago is worse than none.

And when nobody wants to be on it. Forcing staff onto a public page is a real objection, and a single grudging photograph tends to look exactly like what it is.

What each profile needs

A real photograph of the actual person, what they do day to day, and what they did before, written as text an answer engine can read rather than inside an image. Those three do nearly all of the work, and the third is the one most often left out.

Specific experience persuades; a list of qualities does not. Twelve years fitting kitchens before joining us says something. Passionate about customer service says nothing anybody can check.

Where somebody holds a credential, name it with the issuing body. Our page on credentials covers the wording, and vagueness here is the usual source of trouble.

What a profile should contain

The list below is what a customer is actually checking. Most team pages carry the first two items and a sentence of personality, which leaves the useful questions unanswered.

• A real photograph, taken recently
• What they actually do, in plain terms
• What they did before this
• Any credential, with the body that issued it
• How long they have been with the business
• Which part of the work they handle
• Nothing that would embarrass them to read aloud

Photographs

Taken at work rather than posed against a wall where you can. A picture of somebody doing the job says more about competence than any studio portrait of the same person.

Keep them consistent. A team page mixing professional headshots with phone snaps reads as unfinished, and consistency matters more than quality here.

Get permission, and agree what happens when somebody leaves. Our page on images and copyright covers the wider question of rights to photographs you commissioned.

Keeping it current

Review it whenever anybody joins or leaves, and at least annually. Somebody listed who left is the single most common fault on these pages and it undermines everything else on the site.

Remove promptly rather than politely. A former employee still shown on a live page can be a genuine problem for them as well as for you.

Our page on keeping content current covers the routine. A team page belongs near the top of any review list for exactly this reason.

One-person businesses

Do not build a team page. Build a good about page instead, with your name, your face and your background. Our page on about pages covers the shape.

Writing as a team when there is one of you fails at the first phone call, and the gap between the page and the reality starts the relationship badly.

Being a single named professional is a selling point for plenty of customers. Direct access, one conversation, and the person who quoted doing the work are all genuine advantages.