Top 5 New Year resolutions for intranet owners

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…

• Do some user research and act on it: talk to several users and find out not only what they like and dont like, but also what they need on their site. Click here for some tips on running a user survey.
• Focus on quality, not quantity: Do some housekeeping on the site, and get rid of anything that is out-of-date. There is nothing that will kill an intranet faster than the idea that all the content is already old or dead. V3.co.uk talk about old content here, and we talked about it a while ago as part of this article.
• Start a regular newsletter to drive steady, targeted traffic. The amount of traffic you can pull in with a newsletter is staggering, and it will remind users that you’re still keeping the site fresh. Make sure the subject line is exciting, though: don’t just use “Intranet news”…
• Introduce some new functionality. Many people just use intranets for simple document sharing, and maybe have a few articles, but intranets are pretty versatile. Maybe you could display your monthly sales in a Flash app, or introduce blogging and commenting functionality.
• Put in place a content pipeline to ensure fresh, regular and frequent updates on the homepage. Don’t rely on people using the intranet “because it’s there”; content needs to be planned and site owners need to maintain it.