Discover 5 tips to help you design an effective intranet home page with real customer’s intranet home page examples to draw inspiration from.

Whether you are implementing a new intranet, or redesigning an old one, there are some standard best practices to take into account when designing your new intranet home page. Many of our customers have embraced these concepts and created home pages that engage and excite their employees, enhancing their use of the intranet and ensuring they keep coming back for more.

Below is 5 best practices for designing your intranet home page:

1) Keep it Simple

When your employees land on your intranet home page, you want it to be a welcoming experience.  Bombarding them with too many links or too much information will become overwhelming and cause most people to instead jump to the search bar, or leave the intranet all together.

Before jumping onto your home page to add content, first list out the most important information that needs to be front and center. For most organizations “What’s New” is a no brainer. Other featured items really depend on your industry and company culture. For example, O Bee Credit Union features their Top Dog Blog, while Gold Coast Hospital highlights new staff members on the home page.

2) Make it Engaging

This point may seem obvious, however what exactly does an “engaging” home page mean?  A few examples include:

• Bold Bright Colors: Verity Credit Union uses bright orange and blue coloring to draw the attention it’s employees and provide a fun looking intranet
• Home page Imagery: Bonnier uses large images on its home page to draw attention towards noteworthy updates and need-to-knows. Gold Coast Hospital goes for a more dynamic approach by utilizing a home page rotating banner.
• A Vibrant Top Banner: Homewood Health implemented a vibrant orange sunrise at the top of its home page, creating an inviting space for employees.

Making your intranet home page engaging is a surefire way to improve overall intranet adoption. The more engaging your home page is, the more likely your employees will be to stay on the intranet and explore further into it.

3) Provide Robust Navigation

While you want to keep your navigation simple, you also want employees to find the information they need, and depending on the size of your organization, there may be a lot of it.

Utilizing both side and top menu navigation is a great way to separate content, using your side navigation for quick links for staff, while saving the top menu navigation for important intranet content such as Department Sites, policies, and Online Forms.  Northfield Hospital is a great example of how to design a simple, yet effective, intranet home page navigation.

Within your top menu navigation, you will also want to take advantage of drop down menus and Mega Menus to organize your content.  Mega Menus are a great way to add more content into your top menu navigation, without taking too much real estate on your home page.

4) Encourage Feedback

Your employees are a great source of feedback for your new intranet home page, so make sure you make it really easy for them to tell you what they think!  You can either set up an anonymous Online Form for employees to submit their ideas, or create a more public suggestion box, using the Idea Share Exchange, where employees can not only post, but also collaborate on ideas.

Whichever feedback method you choose, ensure that it is accessible right from the home page.  O Bee Credit Union added a suggestion box image to their home page which links to their online suggestion box for employees.  This image really stands out on their home page and makes it easy for employees to provide feedback.

5) Drum-Up Employee Chatter

Your intranet home page is a great way to encourage employee involvement and adoption of your intranet.  Encourage employee chatter through changing your home page design for different seasons and company events, or come up with a catchy intranet name.

Some clever intranet names include:

• Dwight (Pima Federal Credit Union) – The Employee Know-It-All
• The Pantry (New Seasons Market) – describes everything you’ll find on the intranet
• InSight (InTouch Credit Union) – describes what you’ll gain from using the intranet
• Fetch (San Diego Humane Society & SPCA) – describes retrieving information and resources on the intranet
• The Glove Box (Bob Moore Auto Group) – Everything you need right at your finger tips
• Emergency Web (Gold Coast Hospital) – Quick information on the go
• VERN (Veridian Credit Union Intranet) – Veridian Employee Resource Network

Do you have more ways in which you make your intranet home page more engaging for employees?  I’d love to hear them!  Leave your comments below.

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