If you’re a business owner, featuring your staff on your website with photos and bios are a great way to boast the talent at your company and help your employees feel like part of the team. And, if you’re a one-person show, it’s still important to let site visitors know a little bit about you. So, what do you need to have in a website bio?
Basic information (around a paragraph or two) and a high-resolution headshot are two key ingredients to a great bio. Depending on your business, you may also want to feature additional photos for each staff member to let them express their unique personality, such as fun, “real-life” images that might be found on a social media platform like Instagram. We typically don’t recommend pulling in an actual Instagram feed for a few reasons. First, the quality of photos is typically better if you add them to the site manually. Second, APIs that are used to pull in social feeds are notorious for changing without notice — leaving you with missing images on your site if you don’t catch it right away. Finally, social media feeds are personal, and some photos posted might not be appropriate on a website.
It’s a good idea to keep headshots consistent and in the same style in order to look uniform on a bio archive page. Alana recommends having the same photographer take each headshot if possible. If that’s not possible, try to find a photographer who can shoot in the same style as someone you used previously. Photo backgrounds don’t necessarily have to match up for each staff member, but the editing style should be consistent. A consistent style may not always be obvious, but it is obvious if not all photos follow it!
If you’re writing bios for staff members and are stumped on what to write, or if staff members are writing their own and don’t know where to start, you’re not alone! It can be difficult to write about someone you may not know very well — and it might be equally as hard to write about yourself. Here at Infomedia, we send all new staff members a survey that lets us gather information about them, such as favorite restaurant, previous jobs, whether they have pets, etc. Keeping the bio format consistent is also helpful. And remember, try to keep bio content evergreen — instead of saying how many years you’ve been in business, for example, it’s better to say you’ve been in business since a certain year, or for over five years.