Does your company intranet look contemporary? Or does it look like a website from the ’80s?
It may not seem like a big deal, but the overall look and feel of your intranet can affect staff members’ motivation to use it and their subsequent satisfaction with the intranet.
Below are some common practices that can make your intranet look outdated. More importantly, these can interfere with the efficiency and effectiveness of your intranet. Does your intranet have any of them?
5 Intranet Practices To Abandon — Now
Flash animation
Flash animation refers to animated images. These are plain annoying and can be a big turn-off. Aside from that, they could cause your intranet to load slowly.
Music
Another outdated intranet practice is background music that plays automatically. It’s intrusive, eats up intranet resources, and often just plain distracting. Not to mention irrelevant.
Splash page
A splash page is like a gateway page that doesn’t have any information but forces the user to do something in order to access the rest of the intranet content. The worst thing? A splash page with animation and music. Spare your intranet users the extra work and get rid of splash pages.
Misused images
Beware of using images as background for your page, or putting photos or illustrations willy-nilly all over your intranet. They can slow down your intranet and make text hard to read. Contemporary page designs are clean and sleek, not cluttered with irrelevant images.
Carousel
A carousel is a rotating placeholder for content, usually images. It was popular in websites about a decade ago, to highlight specific content and entice readers to click on images. Carousels started losing popularity, though, now that we have many other ways of accomplishing the same thing.
The bottom line is, everything you put on your intranet should have a very good raison d’etre or reason for existence. Before you add an image, music or any other widget, first ask yourself, “What’s this for? What do I want to accomplish with this?”
If you’re adding an element just because, then you’re probably cluttering up your intranet unnecessarily — and dating it, too.
Contemporary means clean, clear, and relevant. Anything that doesn’t meet that criteria does not have a place in your intranet.
Does your intranet have any of these out-of-date elements? Which ones are they?