Most of the firms I worked with treated the team page as an afterthought - a grid of faces built last and updated never. Then we looked at the analytics. On accounting and advisory sites the team page is routinely the second most visited page on the site, and the one visitors stay on longest. It is quietly doing the work the homepage gets credit for.
Across the advisory sites I have had access to, the pattern holds with irritating consistency. The homepage takes the most sessions and loses them fastest. The team page takes fewer and holds them two or three times as long, with a large share of visitors scrolling the whole way down.
That is not a vanity metric. Time spent on a page of names and photographs means someone is reading names and photographs, which is a different activity from skimming a value proposition.
Entry pages are worth checking too. On several firms' sites, individual bio pages sat in the top five landing pages from organic search. People were arriving at a person, not at a practice.
A homepage answers a question the visitor has usually already answered: what does this firm do? By the time someone reaches an accounting or advisory website they know they want an accountant. What they do not know is whether they want you.
That is not answerable in the abstract. Professional services are bought from people, and the decision is a judgement about competence and about whether dealing with this person will be tolerable for the next several years.
A homepage can gesture at it with words like independent or approachable. A team page settles it with a name, a face, a qualification, and a line about what the person actually does all day.
Four things, in roughly this order. First, credentials written as fact rather than as marketing: the qualification, the professional body, the licensing status where it applies. Chartered Accountant, member of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand. Financial adviser, engaged by a licensed firm. Level 5 certificate, completed 2019.
Resist the urge to dress this up. Anyone who cares about credentials is checking, and they can already look a provider up on the public Financial Service Providers Register. Vague phrasing reads as evasion to exactly the audience you hoped to reassure.
Spell the acronyms out once, too. CA, CPA and CFP mean nothing to a client selling their first rental property.
Second is time: when they joined, and what they did before. Fifteen years at the firm says something about stability that no adjective can. Two years at the firm after eleven in Big Four audit says something else, equally useful.
Third is the specific work. Not the department - the work. Sarah handles rural clients, mostly dairy, and does the trust structures. Mark runs payroll and is the person who answers when Inland Revenue writes to you.
This is the line that lets a visitor sort themselves, and it is the line most bios replace with something about being passionate about helping clients achieve their goals. That phrase sits on roughly half the advisory sites in the country and has never once helped anyone choose.
Fourth is a single sentence establishing that the person is a person. Coaches under-13 hockey in Cambridge. Restores British motorcycles badly. Grew up on the family orchard in Hawke's Bay, which is how the rural client list started.
One sentence. Not a paragraph, not a bulleted list of interests, and not a set of jokey questions about favourite biscuits - I have seen those on a firm managing eight-figure portfolios, and they cost more credibility than anyone there realised.
The human sentence is about proportion. It signals a firm relaxed enough to be slightly informal without suggesting that informality is the product. One line does that. Three lines start to read as a social profile.
Most firms I worked with could not justify a thousand dollars for a photographer, and did not need to. What damages a team page is not mediocre photography. It is inconsistent photography - one professional headshot from a conference, two phone snaps against different walls, one cropped out of a wedding, one that is plainly a passport photo.
The eye reads that as disorganisation before it reads anything else, and it does so in about half a second.
Eight adequate photographs taken the same day, in the same place, at the same crop, look deliberate. One excellent photograph among seven adequate ones looks worse than eight adequate ones, because now the reader is comparing.
The version that works costs an afternoon. Find a plain wall away from any window, stand the subject a metre in front of it facing a large window, and shoot on an overcast day - overcast beats sunshine. Use a recent phone in portrait mode from about two metres back, held at the subject's eye height rather than above it, with someone holding a sheet of white A3 card at chest level to lift the shadows under the eyes.
Then repeat it identically for everyone:
- Same day, same wall, same distance from the wall
- Same crop: head and shoulders, a little space above the head
- Same phone, held by the same person
Book an hour, do the whole firm, and put a reminder in the practice calendar to redo it every three years.
One rule I would treat as absolute: no stock photography of people on a team page. Not as a placeholder for the new hire, not for the partner who dislikes cameras, not anywhere.
The objection is not aesthetic. The page exists to answer who these people are, and answering with an actor is a lie told at the precise moment a visitor is deciding whether to trust the firm. Readers catch it more often than firms assume, because stock people have a look and a reverse image search takes fifteen seconds.
I once found the same stock businessman fronting a Wellington brokerage and a Christchurch accountancy in the same month. A silhouette, or no photograph at all with a line saying one is coming, does less damage.
Two failures share a cause. The first is staff who left - I have found people on live team pages who had been gone two and three years, including one the firm had since taken to court. The second is headshots from a different decade, which produce a small awkward moment when the client meets someone a haircut and twenty kilos removed from the photograph they were shown.
Both happen because the team page has no owner. It is in nobody's job description, so it gets updated when somebody remembers.
The fix is structural: attach it to a process that already runs. A departure processed in payroll triggers a check of the page. Annual planning triggers a review of the photographs. The page goes stale only because the trigger is memory.
The team page is usually the last thing built and the first thing read. If you have a limited budget for improving the website this year, I would spend it there before the homepage, before the services pages, and long before another round of copywriting on the tagline. It is the page where a stranger decides whether to ring you.
