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5. Overly Secured Site

Intranets are touted as corporate systems that serve the user community as a whole. But some content is highly sensitive and needs to be secured for access by only a few individuals or niche groups.

In cases where the majority of content is secured from much of the user community, it's not a good idea to advertise the system as an intranet. You don't want your users to roam around the site looking for information only to find "Access Denied" messages at every turn. This creates a feeling of being "informationally under-privileged" and raises the question "We're all working for the same company. If they have access to it, why shouldn't I?"

4. Poor Search Engine

An intranet must have a search utility to allow users to find specific content without forcing them to navigate through the site's menus. This is especially important in high-volume intranets where related content may be organized across multiple sub-sections and categories.

Users demand, and deserve, a lot from their search engine, one that has the ability to search and locate information not only in HTML documents but also in other digital formats such as PDFs, Word documents, and Excel spreadsheets.

But a search engine is one of those funny components of an intranet; a good one may gain little attention (since that's what users expect to begin with), but a bad one will raise the ire of every user who tries to use it. It's irritating to enter a search query for content that you're certain is contained in your intranet — perhaps you saw it once before but can't remember the location — only to have a languid search engine sputter out, "No results."

3. Repetitious Content

Heads I win, tails you loose. It's the same information conveyed in two different ways. It's extremely tedious for users to have to read three articles with the same message. Many users already feel the effects of information overload so there's no reason to make matters worse by repeating the same information over and over again.

This is why it's important to coordinate the efforts of your content owners, so that each will know what type of content will be posted by the others, thus minimizing both duplication of effort and duplication of content.

2. Roundabout Navigation

An intranet's navigational system represents the logical organization of content (as opposed to its file and folder structure, which represents the physical organization of content) and forms an association among related content. It allows users to intuitively locate and navigate through content with minimal effort.

Intranet users often look to fulfill one of two goals when accessing their system: to find a specific piece of information, or to casually browse the site looking for information on a general topic. But with the advances in technology, users have come to expect their systems to deliver instant gratification. So if you force them to navigate through a labyrinth of menus and sub-menus, they will eventually lose their patience and give up or even forget what they were looking for in the first place.

To combat this, intranet developers should take care in observing the unwritten golden rule of site navigation: No more than three hops from origin to destination — users must be able to find what they're looking for quickly and easily.

1. Stale Content

Coming in at the number one way to lose your intranet users — it's the coup de grace, the deathblow, of any intranet: stale content. There's absolutely nothing that will frustrate your users more than visiting an intranet only to find the same old content day after day, or to see information listed in the "Latest News" pages dated from June when it's actually October.

I often equate intranet content management with that of print publications such as newspapers and magazines; without fresh content delivered regularly there will be nothing to sell. Intranets must constantly grow and evolve because you can only keep a user's faith in the system if it consistently provides fresh and timely information each they visit. Otherwise, you'll be faced with a dwindling user-base and a very difficult task of trying to win them back.

For much more on this subject, refer to:

• Keeping Content Owners... Content
• Content Life: The Art of Archiving
• The Golden Years of Intranet Life: Retrofit or Rebuild?
• Intranet Content: Long Live the King

Final Thoughts

Avoiding these 10 common intranet pitfalls will go a long way toward extending not only the life of your intranet, but also your user community's trust and faith in the system. If you choose to overlook them, don't be surprised to find management writing off your intranet by sending it to an early demise — casting it down some empty elevator shaft, never to be seen again.