Hi Folks,

 

I'm currently trying to come up with an intranet design, does anyone know of good sites I can look at for ideas? ie bbc, guardian etc

 

I'd like to do a formal design and a radical design.

 

Any advice much appreciated.

To me an intranet relies more on functionality than "design" so I'm not sure a "radical" design would be appropriate?

 

I would also say that the site should be 100% user orientated so presentation, search and relevance of the content is paramount to making it work.

 

there are lots of resources around for Intranet design, this one was a good start http://intranetblog.blogware.com/blog/_arc...27/3257325.html

Hello, a good place to start would be http://www.ndesign-studio.com/

their designs are really eyecatching. You might find it useful to use Joomla and design a template for it

 

Mahesh

www.multimediaforlife.co.uk

Thanks for the replies

What are your thoughts on the design of an intranet?

 

I've been given free reign to design what I like, should I bother with a web 2.0 layout? Flashy buttons, gradient fills etc?

Make sure content and functionality are core. If a "flashy" design increases usability and usage pleasure, go for it. If its just cruft which gets in the way and slows it down, no.

An intranet should be designed in exactly the same way as a website. Usability, accessibility, findability and good design are all core parts of the process. However the needs of the users are different to those of a "normal" website, so you need to be careful how you apply the principles mentioned above. With a website you're getting people to buy-into something and then take action, whereas an intranet is more about disseminating information.

 

Sadly I don't think you'll find examples or screenshots anywhere without spending some money. Jakob Nielsen's consultancy group do a report, but it costs abut $160!

^ well said!

 

With a typical intranet you will have a lot of information to handle so making it easy to use, find and work with the content is paramount. In a typical organisation you're also likely to have many different interest groups with content that's relevant to only one group or several, so structure, navigation and search are all highly important.

 

Before you even start to design a project like this you need to get a grip on workflow, structure and all the types of content that will be distributed. You also need to be aware of any content that is restricted access (ie management or specific user group's eyes only).

Yep with an intranet content is king, more so than on the internet where your often trying to sell a product or present a portfolio etc.

 

I've actually designed and developed two intranet sites, there's some old screengrabs in the portfolio section of my site ...it's changed quite a bit since (need to update the grabs).

 

My experience is that the best thing to do is find out what your users want on the site and then design build around this.

 

Definately (not mentioned yet) get to know/understand more than a bit about your content, an intranet site designed/developed by someone who doesn't understand the subject doesn't look good, particularly from an information architecture/navigation perspective.

 

As said information and navigation and content first then embellish with the nice graphics.

 

Consider a CMS if you have none web savvy staff updating.