How to create a great staff page on your church website
Did you know that the staff page on your church website is likely one of the most frequently visited pages on your website?
It’s true! Staff pages are one of the most visited pages on pretty much any church website. Why?
It’s because church websites are primarily used by people who are searching for a church, not people who currently go to that church. And this particular audience is interested in the kinds of things NEW people want to know like worship service information, beliefs, and (you guessed it) info about who is leading the church.
People want to know who will be taking care of their kids, who will be leading worship, who will be preaching and maybe even some background credentials on all of these people.
So what do you think it says to potential visitors when you don’t have a staff page, or your staff page doesn’t feature staff portraits, or your staff portraits are straight up bad?
So here are my top tips and tricks for creating an engaging staff page on your church website. Enjoy!
Create high-quality, unified photography
My pet peeve is when I go to any organization’s staff page and see grainy mismatched pictures of the staff, probably screen grabbed from Facebook or something like that.
You don’t need to hire a professional photographer to have great photos. A simple smart phone in portrait mode will do. Then, gather your staff in the same location with some coaching on background and attire, and take some pictures. It really is that easy.
If you need some more guidance on website photography, check out my website content checklist…you’re welcome :)
Create a theme
Next, it’s really fun if you can create a theme for the staff page that accurately displays your staff culture.
Is your staff fun and silly? Great! Take a silly group shot for the top section of the page and then do rotating staff photos with each staff member making their favorite silly faces. Is your church more academic? Then create a more collegiate look that demonstrates this piece of your identity.
Note: While themes can be fun, they can also be distracting. So make sure if you apply a theme to your staff page that it's actually who you are and doesn’t distract people from the point of the page.
Be thoughtful about contact information
It’s wonderful when a church staff is accessible. But it’s not great when spammers use a staff’s contact info and name to scam people.
Scams that use staff info in the name of ministry are on the rise and have changed how I recommend people display their information.
I think it’s great if you want to allow people to email staff members directly from the website, but I would recommend being thoughtful about actually putting the email address directly on a page. This makes it easy for scammers to harvest this information.
Instead, create secure forms people can submit to get in touch with the staff. This protects everybody’s information and can even be more effective with strategic forms with automations built in.
Create Seamless Biographies
Adding biographical information about each staff person can be helpful for visitors, but not when it is really long and distracts the visitor from seeing the whole staff or compromising the design of the page.
So if you’re going to do biographies, I recommend creating them in either an accordion dropdown block OR create dedicated bio pages for each staff person that the primary staff page simply links to. This way your staff page stay clean and uncluttered.
Make your staff page easy to find
Since this is an important page, don’t bury your staff page in a difficult place to find. In fact, I’d recommend putting it in multiple places.
First, make sure the staff page is linked in the “about” folder or equivalent. This is the most intuitive place people will look for it.
Second, make sure you have visual navigation to your staff page on your homepage. Thumbnail images are great ways to link people to key info on your site.
Last, perhaps consider linking individual ministry pages to the staff page so people can learn more about that particular ministry’s leader(s). This puts a face to the ministry and helps build that initial trust.
Need some help building your new church website on Squarespace?
Feeling a little overwhelmed with the idea of building your own church website from scratch? That’s totally understandable. I’ve found most people who manage church communications aren’t actually website designers. So here's a few options you may find helpful.
Download our free ultimate church website content checklist. This free resource will help you get an idea of the kind of content you’ll need to create and/or gather before you get started.
Purchase ones of our Squarespace church website Templates. Our templates will save you hours of time building the page layouts as you’ll be able to simply choose from, save, and customize from a selection of rebuilt layouts.
Custom design: Has all of this DIY talk made you see cross-eyed? I get it. I wish I could say building your own church website is easy, but the truth is, it’s a lot of work.
