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.

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.