On any website where users are sharing information with each other, it is important that sharing feels natural. Social networks like Facebook really made this clear – default profile photos of a silhouette with a question mark made it easy to see which users were not yet invested in the community, and by contrast which users were demonstrating they could be trusted to make the network a better place.

If you are running an intranet, this is even more important. Your company is growing, and many of your employees will be unknown to each other both online and offline. Taking a simple step like ensuring your intranet is full of real-life profile photos will help reinforce their offline office relationships, as well as making your intranet a warmer place where your employees are happy to share information.

Employees knowing each others’ names and faces is incredibly important for your business!

However, setting profile photos in WordPress directly is notoriously cumbersome – your users need to set up a new account on a separate website called Gravatar.

So we created a small extension plugin for WordPress – called “Google Profile Avatars” – which pulls in users’ profile photos from their Google accounts straight into their profile photo on your WordPress site. If your users have already set a profile photo for Google Plus or Gmail, this means you can make your site more personal and colorful overnight!

The extension works with any recent version of Google Apps Login (free or premium). You can buy it for $9, and read more here.