Best Practices For Intranet Design

In this computer era when every aspect of business is managed by computer, Intranet information management has become a vital tool for smooth running of businesses. But to have the optimum result of your Intranet software, you need to have an effective design of your Intranet. Although every company have one design or the other but how effective it is depends on the functionality of the design, not merely its look. Even hiring the services of IT department does not guarantee you its efficient functioning. Keeping all these aspects in mind you need to adopt best practices for Intranet design to have the ultimate result of your Intranet software. These best practices include:

Keeping the design simple and lucid: The first and foremost practice to be adopted while designing your Intranet is keeping it simple and lucid. You should always remember that the wow factor of your Intranet design does not help you to achieve your goal, as your purpose of Intranet design is to provide information to your users in the best possible way. This is the reason why your simple design is going to appeal more to your users rather than a complicated but very good looking design. The graphics used in your Intranet portal should be simple and should be used in a limited manner. You should give more stress on providing information. You should not clutter the page but at the same time should not leave much space in non-content area.

Consistency of the design: You should always be consistent in designing each Intranet page. It has been commonly seen that the Intranet pages of different departments of the company have different layout. This should be avoided and you should maintain same look and feel of the design all through your Intranet pages. For this you can appoint a group to look after design consistency. Consistency of design also means consistency of colors. You should always use the similar color pattern throughout the Intranet pages and the color you use should not be too loud to distract users attention from content. You should also avoid using same design for both your Internet as well as Intranet page.

Efficient content management: You should always mange your Intranet content efficiently. For this you can appoint a lead publisher and can even train him/her to manage your Intranet. You should always ensure that the form used by the employees should always be simple and with efficient content management provide sufficient information to your employees. To maintain the quality of your Intranet content, you should have centralized content editing and should always review pages carefully before posting. The use of templates as well as content management system will prove very helpful and it should be used along with automated content feeds from outside.

If you follow all these best practices you could have the best Intranet design that would provide the best functionality to your users.