Setting the standard

There is much to organise and implement when undertaking a redesign of your intranet. With that in mind, it’s understandable that organisations sometimes lose sight of the small details that help give a project a cohesive form. Pauline Foley, intranet administrator at Cornwall County Council, explains how corporate standards can be the linchpin of an intranet’s success.

If you’re planning on redesigning your intranet site, a crucial area to consider is corporate standards. Many may wonder if complying with such standards is worth the effort and, at one time or another, may have asked themselves the following questions: Will employees actually care about complying with standards? And if so, will those guidelines help improve the effectiveness of the intranet?

As a local authority, Cornwall prides itself on providing a service to its residents it can be proud of. Cornwall County Council has set standards for all of its services, procedures and processes, including those related to the internet and intranet, which have very defined standards.

Our website and intranet have had corporate standards applied since their initial introduction; those standards have been regularly reviewed and consequently amended to meet requirements of government legislation and accessibility guidelines. Constant review of both these systems is considered vital to the efficiency and effectiveness of the standards. Our corporate standards are viewed as a means of ensuring the development of the internet and intranet is measured and controlled and not developed erratically through personal preferences.

Intranet standards

In the past, some of you may have relied on the introduction of web content-management software to handle the operation of your intranet. Unfortunately, as you may have already learnt, this does not work. What that content-management software will do is let you know who to send a particular web page back to when it needs to have corporate standards applied. In fact, solid corporate standards will aid the implementation of a web content-management program and ensure the service it provides to your organisation is one of value. No matter what company you work for, whether in the private or public sector, if your intranet is going to be successful it must provide what your employees need – information. Of course, this must be up to date and easily available if it’s going to be of any use to employees or the business.

The benefit of standards

Try and picture a web page that has no standards. If you’re having difficulty imagining what this would look like, here are a few examples I’ve encountered.

Inconsistently underlined hyperlinks;
Hyperlinks that appear to be in place, but are inconsistently linked to another page or site.
Sentences written using capitals; not for emphasis, but because the author felt like doing so;
Text in multiple colours;
Different sections of a page with different sized fonts.

We have become so used to certain web standards that we have forgotten the nightmare that a web page could so easily become without them. Therefore, if you accept the need for these basic standards, it is not difficult to see why you should improve upon them and introduce equally important corporate web standards for your organisation’s intranet. As an employer, if you accept responsibility for providing your employees with accurate information in a format that they can easily use, then your intranet pages can only be more efficient and effective if they include corporate standards.

At Cornwall County Council, we tell our staff that the intranet is designed to make their working life easier. Yet a poorly designed intranet can often do the exact opposite. Most businesses will take time to market their products and time to train their staff, yet so many expect their intranet to miraculously appear out of the ether. Management often expects an intranet to require little thought or time, whether it’s for the basic design, re-design or maintenance – despite it being the most valuable source of information available to their staff. The truth, as many of you may already know, is that intranets do require plenty of thought and even more time to design and implement properly. The introduction of corporate standards, in addition to the time taken to design and maintain the site, should help form the basis of a successful intranet.

Most successful corporate standards are fairly innocuous, whether it’s wearing name badges or the way the telephone is answered. Therefore, it’s reasonable to start at a basic level when trying to extend those principles to the intranet. Still, it’s often the small items on a computer screen that can bewilder or facilitate intranet use. For example, one of these crucial items is underlining hyperlinks to make web page navigation easier. This standard is a relatively simple thing, and yet we all know what it means and are familiar and comfortable with it. If we’re comfortable with something, we’re more inclined to use it. This is a good way to make a corporate standard stick. If you keep design constant with the use of standards, it makes using the intranet less painful for your staff.

Implementing corporate standards for the intranet isn’t rocket science and they aren’t intimidating to apply. Indeed, they are often deceptively simple to implement.

For example, the decision to use web text in a ten or 12 point font. Whichever size you choose, once that choice has been made, you’ve created your first standard and likely had good reason for doing so, based on your business needs. Although a small step in the process, such a decision is simple and can act as a credo for the rest of your standards: make a choice of available options for valid reasons and stick to them, just as you would do with any other business decision.

Common standards

You will probably find that the most commonly used corporate standard for intranet design will include the use of headers and footers on pages. This is because the user automatically knows they are in the right area of the intranet in which to search for information. However, the design of these two simple areas will affect the design of the rest of the page, especially with the use of colours. As such, the design of your header should be considered very carefully.

For instance, the colour of every table throughout the intranet will have been chosen so that they coordinate with the corporate colour scheme. You may well end up with hundreds, even thousands, of tables within your intranet pages. Any change to the corporate colour scheme will necessitate updating these tables, and it is only when they are updated that the corporate image is maintained. This is a very time consuming process with no quick fix.

Although it doesn’t sound very exciting, small details like this are the things that help craft and sustain a corporate standard. Surprisingly, they can also generate the most discussion when trying to introduce a redesigned page.

Implementation

Having decided upon your corporate standards, the next stage of the design process is to implement them, which isn’t always as simple as you might expect.

For staff who are involved in contributing information to be published onto the intranet, those same standards can be interpreted into the following guidelines.

Don’t use a particular font;
Don’t use capitals for emphasis;
Don’t underline for emphasis;
The text has to be black;
The page colour must be consistent;
The bullet points will have to be round;
If an animated graphic or photograph doesn’t provide any useful information, remove it.

A good intranet provides valid and up-to-date information with little effort required to locate it. You want your employees to be using the site every day, so any design that forces them to scroll down the screen to find useful information indicates that their working needs fall behind the desire to have a pretty screen. So it would appear that developing the intranet (with or without corporate standards) isn’t enough. Unless it reflects the requirements of your staff, the majority of them will be reluctant to use the system.

While you want to implement your standards, you don’t want to alienate users. Therefore, take account of their opinions when developing guidelines. It will improve the likelihood of staff looking at the intranet, and this will hopefully encourage them to provide more information for it.

Sharing information

Some businesses may already have a corporate internet site and may want to share information between it and the intranet. Opinion is mixed as to whether it’s better to hold information in one place and link between the two or hold information on both sites. Whatever your company decides, it should think carefully about the design of pages where the information will be shared, no matter how that sharing occurs. Some questions to ask should this situation arise include:

Do you really want to be maintaining two pages with very different designs?
Would it be easier to have pages that are similar enough to allow the page to either be shared by the internet and intranet, or at least duplicated for both areas?
If you have produced information with the original intention of providing it only on the intranet and then realise it is suitable for the internet, do you want to re-style the page to comply with a totally different page design?

These questions have no right or wrong answers, because standards are a business choice. But we should all feel justified in questioning the validity of any corporate standard if it prevented a more beneficial way of conveying the information.

A corporate standard doesn’t mean having to re-invent the wheel. If you’ve seen something you think works on another website, use it on yours, as long as you aren’t infringing on copyright. An example of this is the use of a navigation bar, which tells you where you are in a web site and how you got there. This means of navigation is now so widely used on web pages that users expect to see it there. If most users are going to look for this type of navigation to tell them where they are in a site, then any intranet redesign ought to include it. Because the user is already trained in its use and looks for the feature it becomes a standard for them, even though it may not currently be one of the company’s. Consistent use of such a feature on public-facing web pages should have an affect on what becomes a corporate standard for your intranet.

A crucial aim of a corporate standard should always be the accuracy and validity of intranet pages. Pages that look good and are easy to navigate are of little consolation if staff can only find outdated information on them. A quick response when updating information on the intranet is vital to its success. Your staff must have confidence in the information they are viewing or they won’t be able to perform their jobs properly.

In today’s climate we are all trying to use technology to its full advantage and the intranet shouldn’t be excluded from that process, because it has the sole purpose of providing your staff with information. You’re providing your employees with the means to have easy access to as much information as possible. In the end, that can mean only one thing: greater success for your business.