Building an Intranet: Home Sweet Homepage

摘要

The opening line of Under Milk Wood by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas says "To begin at the beginning." It seems a good place to start looking by at the homepage of an intranet. Home should be a familiar place to its inhabitants. They will know what is in each room, cupboard, or shelf with at least an initial level of confidence. They will not expect to find packets of pasta in the cutlery drawer- even though the drawer is in the kitchen and is, in theory, a place where you could keep pasta. In our house, the keys to the car hang in the kitchen. The garage would be a very logical place to keep car keys, were it not for the fact that the garage door key is on the same ring as the car key. It is all a question of putting things in places that match the way we run our lives. Intranet homepages should be created in the same way. Once inside, do we need to be reminded whose house it is? So why, on one intranet homepage I saw recently, was the logo of the organization featured so prominently that users had to scroll down below it to see all the information categories? The company's answer was that the logo was used on the Web site, so it seemed to make sense to feature it on the intranet. If users need to be reminded on a daily, if not hourly, basis of who they work for and that they are using their firm's intranet, then there is little hope for the success of the organization much less its intranet.