Nothing kills the authority of an intranet site – or any website – faster than obvious, avoidable errors. These errors can be factual (such as job titles or general facts), graphical (the wrong image assigned to the wrong person, for example) or grammatical (bad spelling or punctuation), but whatever the mistakes the effect is the same: users go elsewhere.

It’s not enough to make sure that your site owner is thorough. Everyone makes mistakes, and the best way to cope with the possibility of a slip-up is to ensure that you have a dedicated quality control process in place at all times. If you use an agency to run your site, then they should be able to work this out with you. If you work on the site yourself, read on for some key areas that you should focus on…

Read on…

Maintaining an intranet can be a tricky business, but why not kick off 2010 with some New Year resolutions that will make your intranet fly? Read on for our top 5 tips for the year…

Read on…

What’s the best way to design your intranet site? Who should you centre your intranet around: the site owners, or the site users? Take a look at our presentation that highlights the advantages – and disadvantages – of both approaches, and that offers advice on how to build your site to be usable for everyone.

Information architecture is a key phase in all of our projects at Content Formula. Whether website or intranet, we know that if you get the structure, organisation and classification of content right at the start of the project, the end result will be a seamless, usable site.

It always starts with defining both the business and user requirements. It’s important that you define both, because the way the business wants to organise their content is not necessarily going to be how users will search for it. There are numerous ways to gather this information (that’s a whole other blog post!), including interviews, surveys and focus groups. This stage is also often combined with an audit of any current site or content.

Read on…

On one of our intranets, we developed custom functionality to enable employees to rate feature articles. The client stipulated that ratings should appear itemised beside the article with each employee’s name.

However, there was the possibility that this would discourage members of the organisation from providing feedback, given news of soaring unemployment all over the world due to cutbacks.

The fear that all employees’ engagement is visible across the internal network potentially leads an employee to ask themselves “will my manager scrutinise my level of participation in my next appraisal?”

Read on…

SharePoint has launched a revolution in the workplace. Thanks to its easy-to-use collaborative features all employees can now publish information about their projects, initiatives and skills onto the corporate intranet.  We hear stories of blogging CEOs; departmental wikis that allow everyone to post the solution to their problem; forums buzzing with activity. It’s like Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia all rolled into one. Oh, and don’t forget Google.

Sadly, reality in most companies doesn’t look like this. A typical SharePoint intranet is made up of many, many pages containing poor quality content. There’s an abundance of uploaded Office documents with filenames that tell you very little about the contents (do you really want to click on “pm_update.ppt” to find out what it’s about?). The countless forums you come across contain one or two obviously planted (and unanswered) posts from last year. Content that you do take the time to read is poorly laid out, badly written and boring. Images are either massive and take an age to download or they have been distorted and shrunk beyond recognition. Jo User is poorly served. Read on…

An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a bar. The bartender turns round and says, “Is this some kind of joke?”

I’m sorry: terrible gag. I don’t know any good jokes. However, love it or hate it, would you put it on your company website?

One of the hardest things to get right with online content is tone. A lot of content – both on intranets and the internet – is written in a formal ‘company’ voice, thick with information and respectability. More light-hearted styles of writing are often shunned for coming across as inappropriate.

Read on…

It’s an almost universal requirement for corporate intranets to post organisational charts, but it can be pretty time consuming to maintain, especially if there are regular staff changes.

A common approach is to create the chart in PowerPoint and upload it as a downloadable document. Of course, this means that you have to spend a fair amount of time drawing the charts initially and then more when you need to download the file and make changes (especially if you need to add another level to the hierarchy). As a result, the charts often become outdated and unreliable. Read on…

A common problem with intranet content is that it is often out of date or, just as importantly, it is perceived as being out of date by users. Keeping all that content up to date can be a challenge, especially if the intranet is low down on the list of responsibilities for content owners.

A good way to keep your intranet current and relevant is to focus on key information and brevity. Intranet dashboards are supportive of this approach as they display only top level information, usually in a graphical format that makes it quicker for both the audience to digest and the content owners to share.

Read on…

One thing we notice when we’re looking at large intranets is the sheer number of ‘external’ attachments that they often have. Rather than displaying content on HTML pages, many intranets make users download PDFs and Word DOCs.

These documents have their place online. They’re great for larger articles or graphic-heavy content. They’re also good for templates and policies – essentially, things that a user might want to print and read, or that don’t need to be changed. They’re also good when an intranet relies on users to upload content, as templates can be provided. Read on…