Hi Owen,
If you’ll update your theme, that should take care of the spacing in your staff section.
You can offer subscriptions for new posts. It’s not something I’ve done very much of, but when I did that for a client, I used a service that MailChimp has called an RSS Feed campaign. It pulls your posts that have been published since the last newsletter and then sends them out to your subscribers automatically. The advantage of using a service like MailChimp is you actually build a list with a legitimate email service that you can use to send out other email campaigns if you need to. Some of the plugin options that offer post subscriptions don’t build your list in a way that you can really use outside of the post updates.
There are quite a few plugins out there to allow users to login with various services to comment. By default WordPress has a very low barrier to comment, requiring only the users name and an email address. Both of those don’t have to be real (they aren’t verified in any way). I would imagine there are plugins that could make either of those optional.
I would definitely have some analytics in place before going live so you can measure things. Before you add GA, you’ll want to take some measures to keep out spam (yes GA has spam visits). There is an article at https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter that can show you how.
Personally I would go with MailChimp. There are plugins out there that can add a sign up box to help you build your list. They offer RSS feed campaigns so you can send updates that way. Plus it’s free for lists up to 2000 addresses and 12,000 emails sent per month.
Take care,
Bill