The design of public websites, particularly when they have a marketing or branding role, is vital. In these cases, a team of experienced graphic designers and front end developers work hard to create polished and beautiful designs. When it comes to intranets, however, is their 'look and feel' so important? Fundamentally, should intranets look sexy? Design of public sites We are all exposed to the wide range of designs for public sites, from the very ugly to the very beautiful. Major consumer brands have attractive and vibrant home pages, while even technology companies present polished designs. These sites reflect the

There is a lot of work involved in redeveloping and relaunching an intranet or website. The project management challenges start early, and it is easy to overlook the time (and effort) needed to migrate the content from the old to the new site. Yet, for its lack of visibility, content migration is often the single biggest activity in a web redevelopment. Certainly it is the least interesting, and unfortunately unavoidable. This article explores a number of options for the migrating content, and provides some practical suggestions that should help it to go smoothly. Redeveloping a site Two factors often drive

What is the intranet for? An easy question to ask, but surprisingly hard for many intranet teams to answer. To be successful, intranets must have a clear definition of their purpose and character. This underpins decisions about future directions, as well as current priorities and activities. Answering this question goes a long way to defining the intranet 'brand'. More than just colours and logos, the brand captures and communicates the nature of the intranet. This briefing will outline a simple technique to start the process of determining the intranet brand. Product Reaction Cards The user experience team at Microsoft have

There are often situations where there is a difference of opinion between the central intranet team, and the decentralised authors, owners or stakeholders. Depending on the team, there may be situations where they aren't confident of tackling the issues, or winning over the decentralised groups. To help build team confidence, and to win more of these arguments, there are three things all intranet teams should try to do: understand staff needs and issues put yourself in their shoes build the team's professional skills Each of these is explored in the sections below. Understand staff needs and issues Discussions relating to

Thanks to all those who provided feedback on the earlier mindmap that we posted. We’ve now incorporated a range of changes and improvements, and have released version 1.4. The fonts …

The phrase 'trying to boil the ocean' refers to tasks that are clearly and heroically impossible. This is exactly what most teams take on when they try to get every intranet page up to the same high standard. In the earlier article titled Intranet authoring: a hobby?, the role of intranet authors was explored, highlighting that many are required to maintain their content 'on the side', with little training or support. Most intranets struggle to deliver consistent, accurate, readable and valuable content. Despite this, the goal of many intranet teams remains to deliver universally 'good' content. This briefing will discuss

The rise of enterprise search has put an increasing focus on searching ever broader collections of content and documents within organisations. While enterprise search projects generally start with simple intranet search, attention quickly moves to searching document management systems, collaboration tools, business systems and fileshares. Underpinning this work is the belief (or hope) that business value will be delivered to users by deploying a more extensive search tool. Unfortunately it is often the case that searching more is not better than searching less. This briefing will look at some of the challenges involved in implementing enterprise search, and provide practical

I was co-facilitating the Intranet Leadership Forum workshop in Melbourne today, and we started the day with a discussion around collaboration. We covered a variety of questions, but one key …

When in Melbourne this last week, we ended up in a crowded restaurant, sitting next to a pair of pilots. From one of the major international airlines, they were enjoying a 48-hour layover in Australia, between long-haul trips. Inevitably, the discussion touched upon intranets, whereopon they exclaimed: "Ours is awful! We need to get you over to fix it!". That aside, they also told a very interesting story about their training systems. Apparently a new "home study" program has been recently put in place. A fairly typical e-learning system, the pilots read through a number of screens of information, and

Most modern content management systems provide two different ways of editing site content: in-context editing and back-end editing. While in-context editing is often seen as 'sexier', each method has its strengths and weaknesses. This briefing will explore these two editing options, providing advice on when to use them in practice. In-context editing In-context editing allows authors to browse the published website, using site navigation in the normal way to find the desired page. By clicking a small or hidden button (or some other equivalent action), they can switch into editing mode, updating the content of the page in place. During