Don’t Let Boring Homepages Kill Your Intranet Content

Intranet homepages are typically the starting points of any intranet experience, but too often they fall prey to a stiff, template-style layout that makes content appear generic, unappealing and stale; even the most well-written, feature-packed, media-rich intranet content is essentially useless if no-one wants to click through to it.

So what can you do to stop this happening? Well, one obvious fix is to look at changing the way you create your intranet homepages. Don’t think that you have to have the same homepage as everyone else – consistency is good, and standards are set for a reason, but if you always follow the herd then it becomes hard to stand out.

Keep to the things that make homepages work – give users the information that they want and need, adnd make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for – but try to think more creatively about how you might present a more attractive page to your end users.

For instance, you could try something like this:

It’s a bit different from the average intranet homepage, no? And all of the content above is dynamic, updated from a regular intranet back-end, just like your typical homepage – the difference is that the café-style background images on which the content is displayed are just a little break from the norm. It’s a strong concept, and one that actually developed into a successful homepage for an area of a globally-renowned client’s intranet: why stick to a grey square to display your content when it could be inside a coffee cup?

If your intranet platform can cope with something a bit different, then why not push it a bit? Grab your graphic designer, put your concept together and see what you can make happen; your users will help you in the long run. Creating a more attractive homepage gives good content the platform it needs to shine, and it can really give your usage levels a boost.

Clearly, whether this is appropriate for your intranet depends entirely on your business culture, and this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea (terrible pun fully, completely intended), but if you have a a bit flexibility in your overall approach, or an intranet area that might suit a less business-like feel, maybe a social or canteen area, then there’s no reason you can’t give it a go.

We’d love to hear about – or even better, see – some examples of other innovative intranet interfaces, so do let us know if you have any to share. We’ll be posting up another one or two soon so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

5 Rules to Keep Intranet Content Fresh

We thought that it would be useful to offer some easy-to-follow rules for keeping your intranet content fresh and new.

Maintaining the standard of your intranet content is key to keeping users interested; creating new content makes gives your users a reason to come back to your intranet time and again, maintaining high usage levels and helping to make the most of your installation.

So what are our recommendations?

1. Conduct regular content reviews

It seems obvious, but regular reviews really are a must. Keeping track of what’s happening with your content is vital to maintaining usage levels in the long run.

Find the review technique that works for you, whether you have a single content editor, group reviews or individuals responsible for their own content, and make sure that you schedule your reviews on a regular basis – six months is ideal for regular maintenance, twelve for more significant overhauls.

Stick to your schedule and analyse all available statistics – for publishing, reading, access times and areas, and anything else that you can use to inform your review.

2. Involve end users

Get people involved – if you give your end users a stake in the intranet’s development, then they are much more likely to feel positive about engaging with elements such as review processes.

Encouraging your users to review their own content should be part of your wider engagement strategy, so make it a big part of what you do to give users a ‘voice’ on your intranet – highlight the contributions made by the more helpful users to reinforce the perceived validity of the review process.

Failing to keep users engaged is setting your intranet up for failure: keep users involved, and your intranet will go from strength to strength.

3. Give your audience the content they want, as well as the content they need.

Your content should have two aims – to inform your users, and to engage them too. Information such as company policies, holiday allowance, organisation charts and official forms should all be online and easily accessible to make your intranet an integral part of your operations; hosting this type of mission-critical information on your intranet makes it an indispensable part of your users’ daily lives and creates a healthy reliance on your system.

However, giving your users the information they need is only the minimum requirement – the ideal position is providing your users with information that truly engages them. Find out what your users like to do on the web, and see if it can be applied to your intranet – blogs, wikis, and other web 2.0 and social media applications can create a valuable ‘buzz’ about the intranet, and you can use that buzz by directing them to more business-critical areas through targeted intranet adverts or links – the same model that internet advertisers use on commercial news sites, for example.

You can even co-opt the intranet sites they like to visit out of formal work hours by providing RSS feeds of their favourite sites. Don’t be afraid of including less business-focused content or sites – using targeted intranet adverts on your RSS feed page means you’re getting to your users from the places they want to go. Of course, a strategy such as this may well require some monitoring of user behaviour to ensure that productivity doesn’t take a hit as a result, but sometimes taking a risk can pay huge dividends.

4. Always create

Seeing the same old content every time you log on to the intranet is a huge turn-off, and so this is one of the big intranet ‘no-no’s.  You simply have to keep content coming, both in the form of updates to existing content and in terms of brand-new articles, images, news items etc.

Monitor publishing trends during your reviews to make sure that all areas of your intranet are getting enough new content – make sure you have key users in each area who will help to push the publishing process to their colleagues.

Make sure that you always have regular content updates – whether these are newsletters, new blog posts, forum replies or any other content type necessary. And archive older content – don’t keep it visible on homepages, but don’t delete it either; rather, you should increase your storage to keep hold of your information assets.

5. Make Publishing Easy

If your publishing process is a hassle, you’re instantly losing content. Now that everyone is used to simple publishing in web applications such as Facebook or Twitter – or WordPress, of course – people want to publish content quickly and easily,  and extra complications can form a significant barrier to this.

You have to take your less technically-minded users into account – these are the people who are ready and willing contribute, but who will be turned off by too many technical steps before they can publish.

Keep publishing short and snappy – you need some degree of classification involved, or you’ll end up with a content jumble sale, but don’t make it an obstacle that stops the publishing process dead.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

Style Guides Are For Intranet Designers Too

They’re not just about making sure that the text in your user content is up to scratch for your intranet – style guides can be extremely useful for designers, too. It may be anathema for outside-the-box creative types, but having a defined set of guidelines from day one can really help to set your intranet design project off down the road that you want it to follow.

Anyway, as a follow-up to our text-focused post ‘Does Your Intranet Use a Style Guide?’, why not take a look at this blog post from Constructive Design Solutions for some interesting thoughts and links on how style guides can help with your design process too.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.

Does Your Intranet Use a Style Guide?

And we’re not talking about CSS or coding here: by ‘Style Guide’, we mean a coherent strategy or set of guidelines to define the way that your users produce and publish content for your intranet.

Of course, for some organisations this might not be a desirable modus operandi; intranets that rely on spontaneous content contribution might be constrained by the introduction of rules and regulations, especially if you employ Web 2.0/Social Media functionality such as Blogs or Wikis on your intranet.

But bigger companies with an emphasis on compliance might find style guides to be a useful way to ensure consistent and clean corporate content for your intranet, to match the content templates that you use to ensure brand compliance.

You do use templates, right? Maybe not… but either way, a lot of the rules on writing for the web are also applicable to writing for the intranet. If you’re interested, you might want to take a quick look at Yahoo’s style guide that focuses, in their words, on ‘Writing, editing and creating content for the digital world’. See what you think.

Check back soon for the next Intranet Ideas blog post; in the meantime, why not visit us and see what we do at www.orchidsoft.com.