Intranet Best Practices

Newfangled's grayscreen prototype development process is very well suited for intranet development. The need for company wide "buy in" and a broad team approach to intranet development are meet by grayscreen prototyping. By creating the prototype early in the development cycle, as many people as needed can review and comment of the site's content, structure, and functionality. Modifications to these areas are easily applied and by the time the intranet has been fully prototyped, the entire organization has had opportunity to make it their own. Grayscreening also enables an intranet to be built with as much speed and flexibility as possible.

The Newfangled content management system adds two aspects to the intranet development process that make it a great option for intranets. Most importantly, it allows the company to easily manage and maintain the content of the intranet by themselves. The NewfangledCMS can create multiple administrators with limited access to information allows many people to safely maintain various areas of the site. This ease of management is essential for any intranet. Because NewfangledCMS is a database/template approach to web development, the integrity of the structure and formatting of the site is maintained while content can be added at will. Changes to the design or structure of the site are much easier to make in the future because only the site templates need to be adjusted rather than every page in the site.

Through the NewfangledCMS the actual development process is improved. That is, the prototype of the site can be "whitescreened" before any visual design is completed or approved. This allows content to be entered into the site before it's completed. This speeds up the development process, and gives the client familiarity with the back end of the site. Those adjustments to structure and functionality that are usually only discovered as the site is used, can be identified and adjusted before the site is finalized.

NewfangledCMS has many components also well suited to the needs of an intranet. Another critical way that the NewfangledCMS meets the needs of intranet development is that Newfangled does not charge for our CMS software, but only our development time. With this approach the client can get a highly functional intranet at a price that would typically only cover the cost of licensing content management software. This focuses a client's intranet investment on its development and not on software.

An intranet can be a fun and exciting project to work on. Intranets (and extranets) often show the most return on investment of any kind of website. When done correctly, they can improve morale and communication, increase efficiency, build a greater sense of corporate culture and community, and provide an extremely effective vehicle for the distribution of company information.

The agency can play a key role in the development of an intranet. Your involvement can help your clients discover ways of maximizing the effectiveness and success of their intranet.