How to Highlight Your Faculty Directory in Your School Website Content
Your school website content should be easy and interesting to navigate, and this includes your faculty and staff directory. Interested parents who may want to enroll their child in your school may spend a significant amount of time scanning through your faculty directory to learn more about your school culture.
This is a great opportunity to show off your awesome faculty! Faculty directories can be as simple as listing a name, job title, and some sort of contact information. They can also be as creative as providing faculty bios, even short videos, to increase the connection between faculty and school families.
It’s important to recognize that your school website content can do more than just list your faculty members, it can actually showcase the awesome faculty that make up your school community and positively impact students each day. Below are easy-to-implement methods to make your faculty directory more engaging on your school website.
Why does your school website content need a faculty directory?
Faculty directories give parents and school families an inside look at who is connecting with their children each day. Whether creatively built out or published in a list format, having a faculty directory with at least one form of contact information is standard practice. It gives parents an opportunity to make direct contact with a faculty member if they have a particular question.
In addition to curious parents, curious potential school employees also dig through faculty directories to get a sense of school culture and understand who they would be working with.
How to Build an Engaging Faculty Directory
While old school faculty directories’ built-in list format may be easy, they aren’t the best option. Not only is it just a long block of text on a webpage, which isn’t the easiest to navigate, you will see far more engagement on your faculty directory page if there is imagery and other elements that are visually appealing to site visitors.
Get Creative with Imagery
A picture says a thousand words! When you include a photo of a faculty member in your faculty directory, there are a few options that can still keep your directory looking professional while having a bit of fun. The standard option is to have each faculty member take a matching professional headshot. The most formal option, this keeps everyone looking uniform.
On the other end, a creative option is to include a photo of the faculty member in action. This can range from speaking at an event, connecting with parents and school families, teaching a class, etc. This gives the school community a snapshot of the faculty member in their element— teaching your children!
Implement a Grid Format
Grids are a popular website feature for 2022 school websites. With great imagery, a grid format is a unique way to showcase your faculty directory online. Site users will see a functioning grid of faculty photos, and have the ability to click on each photo to redirect to a subpage with more information on the faculty member.
Additionally, if you have a long grid list of faculty to include in the directory, ensure the directory interface is easy to navigate. Build in filters that can organize faculty members by different criteria or departments to make it easy for parents to find who they are looking for!
Create Engaging Faculty Bios in Your School Website Content
Engaging bios is your faculty member’s time to shine online. While just listing each faculty member’s name and contact information is simple and effective, this is an opportunity to think outside of the box and encourage your faculty to share more. The creates school website content that can result in greater interactions and connections with members of your school community.
To build interactive biographies for a faculty member, there are several elements that can up the ante on creativity, including (but not limited to):
- Fun facts
- Birthday
- How long they’ve been with your school
- Favorite quote
- Favorite vacation spot, book, or song
- What they love about teaching
- What they love about your school
- Favorite part of hybrid/virtual learning
- Notable awards and achievements
Incorporate Faculty Frequently Asked Questions
While it is convenient for parents that an email address or work phone number is listed for each member of your school faculty, this isn’t always convenient for faculty members if parents are constantly asking the same questions over and over, year after year.
If a faculty member regularly receives the same questions consistently, it may save all parties involved some time if their bio in the faculty directory has a frequently asked questions (FAQ) drop down menu. These questions can range from inquiries about office hours, curriculum, the list goes on.
Highlight Faculty Successes in School Website Content
Your school website content should feature faculty awards and successes. Not only to give applause for your amazing faculty, but to showcase to parents and school families that your faculty members are making a difference.
In your faculty directory, an option is to create a section specifically dedicated to recognizing faculty achievements. These achievements can be internal, like Faculty Member of the Month or Teacher of the Year, or can stretch externally to include community awards and other accomplishments.
In addition to having this section built into your faculty directory, another dedicated faculty success page can be built to highlight any website content curated by faculty members. This can be blog posts, testimonials, award speeches, photo galleries from school events, etc. Another option is to highlight faculty successes regularly in your school’s newsletter and social media posts, so that content is always amplified amongst your school communities.
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