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Intranet Brand

If every department had carte blanche over the design of their office space and sourced their furniture and equipment from different suppliers, you would wind up with an incongruous patchwork or color and form. And you would begin to doubt if they're all really part of the same company.

Individual sub-sites that exist under the umbrella of a corporate intranet needs to share the same brand, not dozens of distinct brands. It can mirror the corporate image or, better yet, it can be a uniquely designed brand that's easily identifiable as the intranet's "look."

Your goal here is to maintain a uniform system brand that promotes instant intranet recognition—so that users can take one look, regardless of which sub-site they're in, and say, "Yes, this is part of the same site."

Let's take EarthWeb, the network of sites that's home to Intranet Journal and other IT-related sites, as an example. As you navigate your way through each of EarthWeb's sites you'll notice a uniformity of design and navigation. Whether you're in Intranet Journal, Hardware Central, or eSecurity Planet, there's no doubt that you're in the EarthWeb network.

The use of a consistent overall brand with a unique sub-site icon and banner that makes each of EarthWeb's sites easily identifiable.

Notice how similar colors are used along with the EarthWeb logo to identify each sub-site as a member of the larger EarthWeb network. Meanwhile, each site contains a unique logo that makes it easy for users to identify the site they're in, with quick links at the top of the banner representing the other sites.

By maintaining a single consistent design, the process of site-wide updating will also be greatly simplified and can even be automated with the use of scripts that can modify the entire site in one pass. If every department maintained their own standard, each branch would need to be manually updated.

Standards Enforcement

The longer an intranet exists, the easier it will be for one or multiple sub-sites to drift away for the corporate intranet standard so it's important to actively enforce them.

There are two main ways to ensure that your corporate intranet doesn't stray too far over the years:

• Appoint a nonpartisan intranet manager
  Site design and standards need to be agreed upon by all sub-site owners wishing to be a member of the corporate intranet. However, the enforcement of standards should be left up to an independent intranet manager and not one of the sub-site owners in order to avoid conflicts of interest.

• Use templates, style sheets (CSS), and predefined guidelines
  Provide sub-site owners with all the necessary tools to maintain the corporate intranet standard in terms of headings, fonts, banners, layout, and graphics.

Conclusion

Most intranet's begin as a scattering of pre-existing departmental sites that are eventually merged to form this huge corporate portal. And as a result of having all these different site owners with their proverbial hands in the pot, it may be difficult to get everyone to agree on a single corporate standard. This includes, to some extent, the standardization of technology—trying to manage the mishmash of Oracle, MS-Access, DB2, MySQL, ASP, JSP, and Perl.

As is the case with the unification of multiple systems into one, there will be times when you're forced to compromise between maintaining a corporate intranet standard and allowing each sub-site to implement unique functionality and design.

But if a particular departmental site differs too greatly and is unable to fit into the overall corporate structure without a fair amount of effort, you'll need to decide whether it's worthwhile to expend the effort to make it conform, simply provide a link to that site, or allow it to function as an independent entity outside of the corporate intranet.

Standardization is a give and take process; don't expect to reach a consensus in one sitting. Every site owner will have their own opinion on how things should be done, but decisions must be based on the good of the whole and not on any one sub-site.