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Most intranet sites I see are created with a lot of graphics. They are brand oriented. They should have a GUI, but not graphic overkill. I guess intranet designers or marketing feels that since you have the bandwidth why not use it. An intranet site is something employees look at a lot. You want something simple and non-obtrusive. Designs will always wear on people, so minimalism on an intranet is always best.
Intranets are about releasing important company information. It is very important that the information is quickly available. You should have a search, and I also prefer a directory on top of regular navigation. Intranets fill up quickly with documents and should have multiple ways for the user to get at what they want. I always try to have custom department pages, set by a cookie, as the homepage for important information relating to their specific job.
With intranets you have many content owners and usually one Webmaster. This is never a fun situation. I set up a directory structure on the server for each owner where I will use server-side scripting to pull from the file system instead of worrying about posting new documents. The content owners can save a file in their directory and it will update the site immediately. Making my job as Webmaster a whole lot easier.
Most intranet designers don’t understand that you have a lot of power with your audience. They are using company equipment and software. I usually incorporate XML with intranets that have millions of documents and pages. In most cases I use XSL to translate into HTML. I am able to offload processing time to my clients by using a client side parser. I am able to get upgrades and plug-ins saturated to my audience very quickly. I don’t really have to worry about cross browser/platform problems. This gives an intranet developer a great amount of options that Internet developers just don’t have.
Security is always very important. Right now a prominent technology school’s intranet is beating my site out on Google for some nice keywords. There is a lot of private information there and it is #1 on Google! Obviously this is very bad. Make sure that your intranets are very secure. I have seen some intranets I have worked on in search engines before, so make sure that it is.
Intranets are completely different beasts than Internet sites. Because they are related, people assume that they are the same. As intranet developers we have a lot of advantages over regular Internet design. We should stop looking at intranets as an internal web site, but as an intranet site that has its own set of problems and solutions.
I couldn't agree more - I very much enjoy developing Intranets, not just becuase of the increased flexibility regarding bandwidth and generally uniform user platform and browser, but because you are building a highly targetted, content rich resource.
You are spot on when you say the Intranets should be looked on as beasts with their own problems and solution - I find that Intranet development quite different from Internet development. Developing Internet sites give you a little more flexibilty when it comes to information architecture and you can adapt your design around it, making minor adjustments to the IA if needed. However, Intranets require a very tight IA that may (depending on the client) need to accurately reflect an organisations internal structure - both from a data point of view, but also from an internal hierarchical point of view.
I enjoy the challenge involved in Intranet development and find it makes a welcome change from Internet work.
