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When you walk around a company's office building you'll notice something obvious: design uniformity. The carpeting, wall color, cubicle partitions, and furniture look the same from one department to the next. And because of this uniformity, we know that each individual department is only a piece of a larger whole. The huge sign outside with the company's name on it is also a dead giveaway.

An office building's façade acts as a gateway — a starting point — leading visitors into the multi-departmental interior. Similarly, your corporate intranet should act as a portal that enables users to access the various internal sub-sites. And as a portal, there needs to be an overall sense of unity.

I'm not implying that every sub-site should be identical to its siblings; they should each be allowed to implement department or discipline specific functionality. However, don't forget that the goal of most corporate intranets is to consolidate, not fragment, all the internal sub-sites into a single, top-level portal. The last thing you want is to have to maintain a dozen disparate mini-systems that seem to have no relationship with any of the other sites.

Standardization of multiple sites will depend on the size of each individual component, the corporate intranet vision, and the basic business requirements of the company. But in order to successfully combine all these diverse sub-sites into one cohesive, unified portal, you need to:

1. Make use of communal resources
2. Implement a consistent navigational system
3. Agree upon a single corporate intranet brand
4. Actively enforce the intranet standards

Communal Resources

Most large office buildings have common facilities that are shared among all employees such as elevators, washrooms, and the cafeteria. But can you imagine what would happen if, instead of sharing these communal resources, each department set up and built their own dedicated set of facilities?

The building would not only be an incredible waste of material and resources, but it would also end up being about five times larger than it needs to be and rival a small New England town where employees search frantically for signs to help them find their way back to their desks.

Although this is a highly unlikely scenario, it's precisely what will happen if every sub-site decided to implement its own design with little consideration for the overall corporate intranet vision.

By adopting an intranet into your corporate business culture, you should aim to have it act as more than just a launching pad for independent sites—it should merge all of these sites into a singular environment.

While each individual sub-site will have unique attributes applicable only to their discipline, they should all share certain communal corporate resources—search engine, navigational system, site map—instead of duplicating what is already available.

Consistent Navigation

An intranet's navigational structure is the primary mechanism that enables a user to navigate and locate specific pieces of information—it allows them to get from one point to the next without forcing them to wander around hopelessly lost and in a daze.

But the irony with navigational systems is that they can lead users astray as much as they can help them find what they're looking for. And this is especially true when you try to consolidate multiple sub-sites—all of which have different owners with their personal ideas as to the best navigational solution.

The most commonly found problem with large multi-owner intranets is the "floating menu" — menus that appear in different locations from one site to the next. If users expect to see a left-hand sided dropdown menu, it's crucial to keep this consistent throughout and not change it to a static menu that shuffles its way to the right somewhere between Point A and Point B.

The content of the menu options may be different depending on the department or discipline, but the design and layout must be the same—menu consistency and location are key.

It's also worthwhile to mention that sub-sites with similar menu options should be:

• labeled in the same manner as the others. If it's listed as “FAQ” on one sub-site, it shouldn't be called “Frequently Asked Questions” on another.

• listed in the same order. If the “About Us” link is the first option on one sub-site, don't list it as the last option on another.