The intranet homepage is the first page which people see after they login, so in some senses, it should act like an index of a book so that they can easily browse and find content easily.

An example of the types of things we see on many of our clients intranet include:

1. Links to different parts of the system;
2. Company news and announcements;
3. RSS feeds that are based on the users permissions;
4. Surveys or polls; and
5. Widgets related to job vacancies in departments, a weather site etc.

While content has long been considered king, the design and ‘look n feel’ is equally important. A couple of visual tips are to:

1. Allow the user to view all content without having to scroll if possible; and
2. Try to create a design that can be used on a number of different screen resolution sizes.

We hope this has given you just a couple of things to consider when viewing your intranet homepage. If you have any other ideas, or would like to discuss giving your site a refresh, please don’t hesitate to contact us by replying to this post.

This means that the users who create the content, take on the responsibility of  uploading and maintaining that content. As Seth Gottlieb notes here in his great piece entitled The Myth of the Occasional CMS user “one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information.”

It certainly is a great idea – imagine all that unbridled knowledge your users could share without having to wait for those geeky IT gatekeepers to upload their content? Imagine all that previously untapped (or tacit) knowledge that now can be created, published & shared by any content creator?

Now don’t get me wrong, this is the way modern Content Management systems work, but only if the users follow the right rules.

Take for example a recent Intranet & Content Management implementation we have done for a Government organisation. While there was an enormous amount of goodwill for the project, we quickly became aware that one of the key content owners who was tasked with updating a critical part of the site, simply was not doing it frequently enough. As we all know, when users login to see out of date content (especially after such a short time of the site going live) trust in the system is severely diminished.

Luckily, the system has built in safeguards that notifies the system administrator when content is becoming stale. But this misses the bigger point. After all the excitement about a new system, a system that empowers the content owner, within 3 months it fell back to the project team to monitor. Is that a failure of the software, the implementation or the user? To be fair, all three probably share a little bit of the blame. I will go into the answer in more detail in my next blog.

In closing, while social media sites such as Facebook prove that people are great sharers of knowledge, there is still some way to go before we see such enthusiasm  replicated in the workplace.

Blog: It is a website that is usually maintained by an individual or an organisation. It is like an online diary that focuses on a particular subject. If you have something in your mind and you want it to reach out to people, blog is the best option. It is a good marketing tool for organisations.

Wiki: It is a collaboration tool where by different people contribute to the wiki page by editing its content. As an example organisations can generate a task list for employees and as and when tasks are finished the employees can update the status of those tasks by editing the same wiki page.

Forum: It is like an online discussion board. It is useful in scenarios where people want answer to specific queries, want to have a poll or wants to start a debate. Unlike wiki, the forums doesnt allow the people to edit each other’s messages. It also gives you the flexibilty to be anonymous.

According to the discussions above I feel forums are more for Q&A, Blogs are better for compiling you views and Wikis are best for collaboration

There are number of factors that affect usability i.e design, layout, content etc. It will take a lot more than one blog to discuss all. However this blog will mainly focus on “How fonts affect usability”

1. Content layout: The content should always be divided into heading and the main content. Make sure you keep it consistent throughout
your website. The heading font should always be bigger than the main content font and preferably bold. This makes your page more readable.

2. Content color: You can have similar color schemes for related topics. This sometimes is important if you have got a lot of content on your website in that case color can be a link between contents.

3. Fonts readability: Use the right size of fonts, don’t make the content font too tiny or too large. Secondly it should be re-sizable using the browser properties.

4. Font family: When design your website use a family of fonts rather than a single font. You can provide options so that if the 1st one is not available in the browser it will use the 2nd one. For example

font-family: “Verdana”, “Arial”, “Times new roman”

In the above example the preferred font will be Verdana, if Verdana is not installed than it will look for Arial and so on.

5. Use numerals to denote numbers: Numerals tend to grab attention of the users as they denote facts.

These are some of the tips that can help make your website a lot more readable. If you have got some more tips please comment on this blog.