Making The Author Template Look Like an Individual Blog Roll

Hey guys,

First of all, I want to thank you for such a wonderful product and having a such a strong support staff. I have answered numerous inquiries on my own just by searching the forums here. So thank you for that, and just know I appreciate your hard work here.

I have run into something that I couldn’t quite achieve by browsing other posts here, so I hope you wouldn’t mind mind helping me out here. I actually think my problem is not that difficult to solve, but I do want to be as thorough as possible to be as efficient as possible with your time. I’ve noticed many posts that are deceptively short but go on for like a dozen replies just to get a good problem description and want to avoid that ahah.

Know that helping me out with this will be immensely helpful for getting my site on the way.

Problem Description
My site is coming along beautifully but I am thoroughly dissatisfied with the author template (that is, the pages found at “[sitenaame]/author/[authorname]”. I have weaselled my way by through CSS and the intuitive layout builder to get my site to where it is today, but when it comes to these dreaded pages I see that I cannot edit them like normal pages and have to start going into the php and still I haven’t come across anything that will get me exactly what I’m looking for.

As it stands now, the author pages (an example included in the links) are wonky and just look plain ugly compared to the rest of the site. The author box gets mangled up and the social media links start displaying vertically, there are no images, and the small gravatar picture just looks mismatched for the page (among other things). My site is eventually going to have dozens of writers and these pages will be very important to bring up to par (and soon).

What I’m Trying to Achieve

OK, so what I’m hoping for is something like the blog roll for individual authors. That is, our current blog roll style shows the gravatar on the left, the featured image of the article and a preview of the text (as well as the page sidebar). That would be nearly perfect for an author page, and a definite level up of the current template. If I could have room to put an author description at the top (the one good thing from the current template) that would also be wonderful. I strongly desire to have more control over the size of the image and to make it as big as we have on our team page.

So, the perfect kind of author template page I’m looking for can be described succinctly as having a blog roll that only shows posts by that author with the “team member” content layout box at the top of it. That really is the best way to describe it. If I can’t get something as complex as the “team member” box in a template, then just settling for something that looks like my current team page at the top of an individual blog roll would do fine.

To be honest, I have thought about creating pages for each individual author and just hiding the fact that those author pages exist (and redirecting clicks on the author’s name/profile picture to those custom pages), but I would really, really love and prefer if I could just get these author pages sorted. If, in the end, this is what I have to do to get what I want to achieve, then that’s what I’ll have to do (and in that case would have a couple questions about implementing that).

Summary

These are the things I want to implement for the /author template pages:

– Display a much bigger, rounded photo at the top of the author page (much like we’ve designed in our team page)

– Display a description (which is currently available on the author template, so saying we want to keep that part)

– Display the posts by that author alone in the format of our current blog roll (that is, with featured images, the title, the tags, and an excerpt of the article leading to the rest)

– Display the blog sidebar on the right (which you can see in our current blog roll)

– Have these pages linked to when you click the author’s name (which automatically appears with the tags)

I think I’ve covered the issue thoroughly. Looking forward to your response!