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.