Staff profiles are a key part of any faculty, department or school's website. They provide vital information such as contact details, roles, areas of expertise, and publications.
It's very important that information on profiles is relevant, accurate and above all: up-to-date.
As with any information affiliated with UL, there must be one central source of truth for each staff member in UL.
This means that having several profiles for one person across the UL website should be avoided, as keeping all of them updated and consistent can be tricky and time-consuming.
Before creating staff profiles, there are a few factors to consider that could very likely save time and effort going forward.
ULRIS profiles
First of all, if the staff member has an ULRIS profile, it's best practice to link to that rather than creating another profile.
Here's an example of where ULRIS profiles are hyperlinked within the person's name.
You can search for the individual on the University's research homepage to find their profile. ULRIS requires the individual themself to keep their content up-to-date.
Automatically pulling from ULRIS
Even better, using the 'embed view' block, all ULRIS profiles affiliated with a particular faculty, department or school can be added to a page at once.
Here's an example of where this view is used.
Person content type
If the individual doesn't have ULRIS profile, but there is a large amount of information about them to include, the Person content type may be used.
Guidance on using this content type can be provided by the Web Team.
Basic information
Finally, if the only information you need to share for a person is their photo, name, role and contact information, it's best to use building blocks to display this information.
This prevents creating new pages for each staff member that contain very little information.
It's better to be able to view all the information at once for each person on one page if there isn't much information for each.
Using blocks to create profiles
Using the two, three, or four column section (depending on how many profiles you have), ensure that all the profile images you're working with are the same dimensions.
Add in your image to a block, and in the block below it insert the relevant text content.
Repeat this for each profile, starting a new section for each new line of profiles.
Deciding how best to display staff members profiles can be an overwhelming task, but it can always be discussed with the Web Team if you're ever unsure.