Intranet Design Summary
Now that you’ve planned and designed your intranet,
it’s time to think about how to maintain it.
We discuss how to keep your intranet engaging.
The bottom line is that designing your company intranet doesn’t have to be the major undertaking that perhaps you first thought it was. The key messages that hopefully you’ve got out of this free guide are summarised as follows:
Don’t overthink or over complicate your site. Keeping it simple and straightforward for end users is more likely to result in an intranet that is popular with staff and gets used on a daily basis.
Keep focused on solving your organization’s problems – that is after all the fundamental purpose of your intranet so try not to get distracted by all the amazing things that your intranet could do. Limit yourself to what your intranet needs to do to relieve those organizational pain points.
Get staff members involved from the get go. Involving your employees as much as possible at every step of the process will not only help to ensure your intranet really does address those organizational pain points, it will also increase the levels of employee engagement and will ensure your intranet is widely accepted and adopted from the very start. To maintain this sense of ownership and involvement post-launch get staff members involved in generating and editing content.
Keep it fresh. Make sure that you regularly review the content and remove any out of date or obsolete information. Keeping it fresh with new content, features and up to date news will give your employees a reason to return. Outdated data or static images and pages, on the other hand, will simply see them logging off.
Make it fun. Yes, it is possible to make the intranet fun and interactive. Quizzes, surveys, blogs, chat rooms and social intranet features are all ways to make the intranet more fun for end users. What’s more, it doesn’t have to be all about work, all of the time.
Make it engaging. Writing content for the intranet that is engaging is an art form in itself, but the secret is to keep things short and concise – bite-sized pieces of information with an option for to click for more detail is the way to go. Most people prefer images and diagrams over big blocks of text. And use your imagination in considering other media to get your message across. How about mixing things up and using videos, webinars or wikis from time to time. It doesn’t always have to be about words.
Intranets offer a range of solutions to businesses of all sizes and in all sectors. Whatever the particular pain point is in your organization – whether it is communications, employee engagement or managing information – like a great many other companies before you, you’ll find that the intranet quickly becomes an essential part of your business operations.
What’s Included In This Intranet Design Guide
Intranet Design Articles
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