Writing for the intranet

Good quality intranet content is integral to the success of an intranet. These full day hands-on writing for the web workshops will equip intranet authors with the skills and knowledge to improve their intranet content for scanability and usefulness.

Topics modules can include:

• the purposes of an intranet
• writing for the web key principles
• understanding your user and their needs
• common pitfalls for intranet content
• elements of great content (with specific ideas to help you improve your content)
• tests for quality content
• top tips for improving intranet content
• let’s write: hands on activity to re-write your content

With up to 15 participants per workshop, participants will learn the key principles and good writing techniques. There will also be an opportunity to write or re-write existing content within the workshop environment which means content is ready to go when it comes time to migrate content or launch the new intranet.

For a full details (including costs), and a list of other courses, see our in-house workshops page. Get in touch with Rebecca if you’d like to learn more.

Reviewing and rewriting content is a big job and cannot be done by the intranet manager alone. But training authors to write great content is a challenge, as most have never learnt to write for a specific audience.

This article outlines ways to help authors write content that is easy to find, easy to read and easy to use.

Conduct in-house training

More organisations are now recognising the importance of good quality content and are using professional trainers to conduct in-house workshops for intranet authors. This demonstrates the organisation’s commitment to the intranet and the role authors play as well as giving authors another skill to add to their resumes.

[September article by Rebecca Rodgers, read the full article]

We have a tool which checks content every day and informs publishers 4 weeks before the review date expires to review and update or remove the content. Failure to do this results in the content being removed and if no action still taken automatically deleted. This means people can’t use out of date information and make bad decisions because of it.

As discussed in the earlier article Escaping the organisation chart on your intranet, this often means getting away from a navigation structure that mirrors content ownership.

Experience has shown that staff will struggle to find information if they have to know who owns the content first. Yet on many intranets, sections are named after the business owners who publish content, or in the worst cases, entirely separate intranet ‘sites’ contain isolated islands of content.

Intranet teams can, however, find it hard to move their sites towards more user-centred structures. Black-and-white goals such as structuring everything according to task and subject often founder in the face of site complexities.

To help with intranet redesigns, this article outlines three broad categories of content:

1. core staff and organisational content
2. business-unit specific content
3. back-office content

[CM Briefing 2010-04, read the full article]

So who is responsible for publishing, reviewing, updating and removing content? “You!” is the answer to any publisher in BT. There is NO central publishing team to do this on behalf of anyone.

The organisation is a well-known global business (hint: open up your fridge and you’ll find one of their products!). They had a huge 500,000+ page intranet, filled with lots of good content, and just as much rubbish. A decision was made to clean up the content.

They went through a two-month process with publishers, discussing what they were planning to do. They didn’t ask publishers to delete content, instead they asked them to update the content if they wanted it kept.

On the big day, they went through and automatically deleted (archived) every page that was older than a specific date, that hadn’t been reviewed. This eliminated 50,000 pages in a single act.

On the day, they set up a “war room” within communications, and a second “war room” within IT, to respond to the complaints and questions. That day, they received 3 emails and two calls. That was it. After the first day, no complaints. Six months later, people are still thanking them for cleaning up so much rubbish out of the intranet.

While this isn’t a complete solution, it does show that a big change can sometimes be made with surprisingly little resistance.

What have your experiences been with doing a big intranet cleanup?

All publishers of formal content in BT must do the basic training courses before they can publish formal content on our intranet. Each course takes about 30 minutes to complete on-line and should be repeated every two years.

Content on the BT Intranet is divided into four different types, to enable information to be managed appropriately and allow users to separate fact from comment. A fifth category covers services, which are online processes where people do tasks to fulfil their roles.

So what’s the difference between PDF and HTML, and when should each format be used?

PDFs versus HTML

The ‘Portable Document Format’ (PDF) was primarily designed to present documents in an easily readable, easily printed and common digital document format that will display as its creator intended (no matter which computer it’s opened with). This hasn’t changed and PDFs remain fantastic for displaying detailed and in-depth information that’s difficult to digest on screen, as manuals and policies, for example.

Alternatively, as an easily interpreted, scaled, read and copied from format, HTML web pages are the standard for web browser-based content. HTML loads quickly, is searchable, can be updated quickly and easily and adapts to a computer’s screen size and resolution.

These different characteristics mark the overall difference between the two formats: HTML is designed to be read on screen, while PDFS are really designed to be printed out.

[Read the full article by Alex Manchester]

Sitting behind this huge volume of content are a wide range of approaches to creating and publishing pages.

The central team has a clear role to play in managing this content, as do publishing guidelines and intranet governance documents.

Yet the central team alone cannot manage thousands of pages, and a decentralised publishing model is established to give business areas responsibility for maintaining their own content. New authors do, however, require support and training.

Against this backdrop of ‘traditional’ publishing models, the growth of web 2.0 and ‘user-generated content’ is raising new questions about how to maintain an intranet.

The key challenge is to establish the right mix of publishing models, flexible in many cases, rigid in others. The intranet team needs to manage the overall process, including adjusting approaches when circumstances change.

This article explores five fundamental publishing models for intranets, providing a description of each, and a brief summary of strengths and weaknesses.

Use these models as the starting point for discussions with authors and stakeholders, and put in place a balanced mix of publishing approaches that deliver the best standard of content within resource constraints.

[May KM Column, read the full article]

This blog has been a bit quiet over the last few months due to some hard work on two seriously exciting projects. The first is a new book, released today.

Over the last eight years, we’ve published 200+ articles covering every aspect of intranets, and beyond. While these have proven to be very useful for intranet teams, what we hadn’t done was pull together all this information into a single volume. Until now.

The only book of its type in the world, What every intranet team should know provides a succinct overview of managing and growing intranets. A must-have for every intranet team, whether just starting or looking for fresh ideas.

This is the definitive ‘quick start’ guide to intranets, providing intranet teams with a to-the-point overview of how to plan, design, manage and grow intranets.

For the first time, we’ve released this volume as a beautifully printed A5-sized 110-page book. This is available via Lulu internationally, and directly from us if you’re based in Australia (we’re surrounded by boxes of books).

I’ll be very interested to hear what everyone thinks about this book!

More information

How do we know whether content is any good? This simple question does not have a simple answer. Yet, I think having a good answer would help us show our employers and clients why their content needs to improve and how their content compares to the competition’s. As a start toward an answer to this question, I offer a set of content quality checklists for seven different lenses through which we can view content.

When we have an intranet that is dominated by the intranet team, content just don’t seem to come in. The central team then seemed to live in a deep well, having minimum insights on the buzz of organisation happenings inside and outside after establishing the technology platform and governance.

It seems that 2009 is the year of intranet content, from the number of blog posts (mine included). What I find encouraging is the maturity of approaches demonstrated in organisations from UK to Singapore. This gives me hope that we are finally moving beyond the two extremes: fully centralised (a bottleneck); fully decentralised without management (anarchy).

Now we need to capture all of this insight, and share it widely with intranet teams…

You will also need to record each page visited and the details of the assessment (I’m putting together a form that I am intending to use myself, if you want a copy please post a comment). Then you need to analyse the results and look for patterns. This part is vital. Do it well and it will provide incontrovertable evidence of the content value. You can go down the route of calculating the standard deviation , which will give you a predicted range of results, but in most cases an average figure presented as a percentage will be more than sufficient. Percentages are great – if you can say that on average 48.9% of a site’s content sucks then you are more likely to be believed.

Sampling would have to represent a fair percentage of the content and samples would have to be taken from several areas of a site or sub-site. Areas must be selected without bias. In an intranet with 1,000 pages a fair sample might be at a minimum 5%, that is 50 pages, or you could use statistical tables for sample sizes.