Recipe: Build a Team Page
A team page is the smallest useful Content Type there is, which makes it the best one to build first if you have never set one up before. There are no galleries, no filters, and no complicated design decisions. You will have it finished in about ten minutes, and everything you learn transfers to the bigger ones.
The example here is Halstead Consulting, a firm that wants a proper "Our People" page instead of a wall of names typed into a text section.
Why not just type the names onto a page?
Plenty of businesses do, and for three people it works. It stops working at the first change. Someone joins, someone leaves, someone gets promoted, and now you are editing a page layout rather than editing a person. Photos drift to different sizes. One bio is three lines and another is nine, so the page looks lopsided.
A Content Type fixes the shape once. Every person is the same kind of thing, filled in the same way, and displayed the same way. Adding a new hire is filling in a form.
Step 1: Create the Content Type
In Content Types, create a new one:
- Name: Team
- Singular label: Team Member (worth correcting by hand here, since "Team" on its own gives an awkward singular)
- URL slug: team
Step 2: Choose the fields
Remember that Title, Featured image and Excerpt come built in. For a team page those three do most of the work already: the Title is the person's name, the Featured image is their headshot, and the Excerpt is the one-line summary that appears on the card.
Halstead adds three fields of its own:
| Field | Type | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Role | Text | "Managing Partner", "Operations Lead". One line, sits under the name. |
| Bio | Rich Text | A few paragraphs. Rich Text rather than Textarea so you can bold a credential or link to a published piece. |
| A direct contact address. Using the Email type rather than Text means it renders as a working link. |
That is genuinely all of it. The temptation is to add a phone number, a start date, a list of specialisms and a LinkedIn URL because you can. Every field you add is a field somebody has to fill in for every new hire, and an empty one usually looks worse on the page than an absent one. Add the fourth field when you actually miss it.
One judgment call worth making deliberately: use the built-in Excerpt for the card summary and the Bio field for the full write-up. If you skip the Excerpt and let the card show the opening of the Bio, cards end up different heights and the grid looks ragged.
Step 3: Design the listing page
Open Archive Design. This is your "Our People" page.
Headshots are portraits, so choose a portrait image shape rather than the wide landscape one that suits project photos. Three or four columns works for most teams. Show the title, the excerpt, and leave the date off, since when a page was published tells a visitor nothing about a person.
Skip the filters. Filter buttons need a Select or Multi-select field, and a team of nine does not need filtering. If you are a firm of sixty across five offices, that is the moment to add an Office Select field and turn filters on.
Step 4: Keep the item page simple
Every Content Type gives each Item its own page automatically, so each person gets one at yoursite.com/team/their-name whether you design it or not. There is no switch to turn that off. What you control is how much you put on it.
For short bios, keep it light. On the Inner Design tab, which is where you lay out the individual page, Halstead uses:
- A section with the headshot on one side and the name, role and bio on the other, each pulling from the person being shown.
- A call to action at the bottom: "Talk to our team."
Two sections. That is a perfectly respectable page, and it means someone can be linked to directly, which matters when a client wants to introduce a colleague by sending a link.
You can pull a person's details into a sentence with the field tokens, so a line reading "Get in touch with {custom.field.Role}" fills itself in per person. It is a nice touch on a page where the copy would otherwise be identical for everyone.
Step 5: Add your people, and put them on the About page
Add an Item per person and fill in the form. Upload headshots that are cropped the same way if you can, because consistent crops do more for how a team page looks than any setting on this page.
Then edit your About page, add a Collection Listing section, and point it at Team. Leave the limit high enough to show everyone, since unlike a portfolio there is no reason to hold people back, and switch off the "See all" link if this is the only place the team appears.
When to grow it
Team is a good first Content Type because it stays small. When it does need to grow, the additions are obvious:
- Add an Office or Department Select field once the list is long enough that people scroll past who they need, then turn on filters.
- Add a Multi-select for specialisms if visitors arrive looking for a particular kind of expertise rather than a particular person.
Both are changes to the Content Type, not to your pages. The listing and the item pages pick them up without being redesigned, which is exactly the thing that makes this worth setting up properly the first time.