The SNO Report: Get your staff page together

The first couple weeks of school might be the most free time you’ll have, before all your time is spent report, writing and publishing, and other class workloads spike, to put together your 2018-2019 staff page.

The staff page can be a fun team building activity, if you do it right, and can, at least, get new staffers acquainted to your website.

Many of the best ones we’ll see this year are already finished. Here’s a sampling:

Farmers’ Harvest

With full-body, vertical photos, the Lewisville High School staff’s style is one you’re not going to see on many other staff pages (including the ones on this list!). And that is just really awesome! Look how cool it can look when you have what fits the 2:3 Vertical Photo Ratio option in the Staff Page settings. With 15 profiles, they also set the page to have five columns of photos, creating three perfectly-assembled rows. Notice their subtle use of props, too — empty Starbucks cups, bananas, a bag of Chick-fil-A — as if it’s needed… their poses exude personality on their own.

The Lancer Feed

What a total classic! These Lafayette High School staffers know you don’t have to have a photo studio to setup excellent portraits. There is a lot of skill exhibited in these photos, but that they’re all taken in the same location is what helps produce a great-looking page. It’s a bonus in this Profile Preview format to get at least a little bit of each student’s biography out on the first page their readers will see when they click “Staff.” The bio is the place where each individual student can get most creative, while the page overall is best done as a team.

Washington Square News

There’s a theme developing, isn’t there? Consistency to the photography raises your staff page to another level. Here is another example with the news staff at New York University. This is a great example of how the Square Photo Radio option looks. The staff picked a red background matching that of the color on their site. Also, there’s an easter egg here. If you actually click on the link we’ve provided you, you’ll notice one profile isn’t human. That’s Crime Bot, a robot against a red background cropped the exact same as the human beings it shares the page with.

For these or any other staff pages, also remember you can now reorder the staff profiles on the page to represent the actual hierarchy of the staff, rather than the date or order the profiles were published in. Learn how to do that here.