Building a better intranet
Published: 09 Jan 2004 11:50 GMT
Of course, your intranet may be a combination of the above. The key is to understand what you want your intranet site to do and what you know it shouldn't do.
Making it easy to get around
Once you know what you do and don't want your intranet to be, it's time to move on to how users will navigate the site. Intranet site navigation is one of the most important components of an intranet. This is largely because of the diverse components of the intranet and the differing needs of the users. It's unlikely that everyone will go to the same places in the same ways. Here are some tips for your navigation:
Consistency -- propagate your menu structure to every site in the intranet. Use frames to keep your intranet navigation on your existing sites. Make sure that, no matter where the users are, they can navigate the entire intranet. Searching -- use searching where possible to allow users to locate the information they want instead of navigating. Whether you build your own, leverage existing tools, or use a mixture of both, make sure that you let your users know what will and won't be searched. Network, not hierarchy -- develop your navigation so that the same item appears in multiple spots. Don't limit a part of your intranet to one location. Place it in the navigation wherever it may be appropriate.
Setting up a navigation system for your intranet may be a frustrating experience, but it's also the one that may make the most difference to your users; spend the necessary time on it. If you need a quick, client-friendly menu, take a look at TreeView.
It's a matter of style
Once you have the site functional, you're likely to get hit with a number of well-meaning comments indicating that the site doesn't "look right." This can be caused by subtle differences in the colours and fonts within a site or across multiple sites in an intranet. The way to solve these inconsistencies is to use a single cascading style sheet (CSS). A CSS encapsulates all of the font, colour, and formatting characteristics for a site into a set of reusable templates. If you want to have a link to another page look a certain way, you would use the link style you've designated. If you want to have your headers always appear a certain way, then you'd use your designated heading style.
You've got to keep them separated
Just when you think that you have everything licked, there's another level to apply to your intranet. Because of diverse systems, users must go between the different systems to find the information that they need. Ideally, you would provide a single page view that consolidates the information from multiple systems.
At first glance this looks to be an overwhelming undertaking. When confronted by multiple platforms and a series of different approaches to managing data, it may be mind-numbing to think of how to pull that all together in one Web page. However, you can take a page from the Microsoft handbook on intranet dashboards and use <IFRAME> tags to create inline frames within a larger page. Using this method, the content displayed on one page can literally come from separate Web pages.
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