When You Need an Intranet—And You Need It Yesterday

byJ.D. Shipengrover

So, the boss decided the department needed an intranet—and then decided you were just the right person to create one. Problem being, you don't really know what to put on an intranet, let alone how to create one from scratch. It's OK, you are not alone.

• AutoSites: Getting started quickly with these prebuilt sites.
• Looking things over: Start at the home page, and look around. You'll find everything's included, even navigation. All you add is content.
• Content: Taking inventory and figuring out what you need.
• Customizing: Customizing the autosite to fit your needs.

First things first, you have to get an intranet up, like yesterday, and that is priority one. Learning all the background stuff is priority two. While my professional soul is screaming NO when I say this, a little voice inside my head understands that for many small companies--and often the not so small ones--this is the case.

Fortunately, this attitude is changing, and more and more planning is being done. Still, sometimes you just have to get something out there and in place, doing at least some of the stuff your boss had in mind when he/she assigned you the project. OK. That being said, you have come to the right place. NetObjects Fusion makes getting something in place and functioning super easy--and not bad looking to boot.

When starting a new project, planning should always come first. I can't stress this enough, but since (in this scenario) you don't have much time to plan, the first thing you can do is open your NetObjects Fusion software and open an autosite.

NetObjects Fusion autosites

Autosites are wonderful for anyone new to Web-site creation. Essentially, an autosite is a complete Web-site template created for you. All of the pages, styles, colors, schemes, and links between the pages are done for you. All you need to do is go into each page and plug in the content. Not that putting together content is all that easy, but it is only one thing you have to do, instead of 20.

What is truly nice about autosites is they are designed to meet a specific business purpose. In our case, Department Intranet (this is the option in my Version 3.0.1 Fusion; if you are using a different version, your options may vary.) One note of advice, if you have to do an intranet for your whole company, not just your department, I would suggest using the Company Internet template and customizing from that structure. More on this next time, today we focus on Department Intranet.

OK, so you have selected Department Intranet and you are looking at the Structure view of the entire site. You will see that we are dealing with roughly 21 pages. (Ah, come on, it's not too bad.) Let's examine the Home Page and then you can go it on your own from there. (Trust me; it is that easy.)

First things first

First, of course, is the home page. The home page is the page that your entire site will hang off of. It is the top level, the page everyone will see first. So the home page is not a page to be ignored. Open the home page template by double clicking on it. What do you see?

Well, you see a banner image across the top, a navigational bar along the left-hand side, a large text area, and finally additional navigation at the bottom of the screen. More important, if you read the first few lines of each object, you will notice that it gives you some advice on what to put there. (After the advice is a bunch of Latin gibberish. This is called greeking and is an old publisher's trick; greeking is used as a placeholder for text that is not written yet.) Every page on the autosite has this to help you through the first time. I am sure you also noticed that your navigational pieces (the links to all of the other parts of the site) are already done for you, which is a relief. You don't have to learn how to do that. Yet   :)

Now you've seen the home page and what you need there, but you probably don't want to write the welcome text yet. Welcome text is best written last. You don't know what you are welcoming them to yet, so how do you know what to write?

Content evaluation and collection

Your next step should be to take an inventory of what the other pages are and what content they need. To do this, make an outline, on paper, of all the pages the site comes with. Open each page and add to your outline the content the page requires to be complete. Then assess how much of the content is:

• Already written in various marketing materials. Marketing and human resource materials are a great place to get content that is already written and essentially approved. (This is perfectly acceptable.) For example, the Services section goes into department policies and contacts. This is stuff you most likely have already received from the human resources department. You just have to type it. (One word of caution, sometimes you will want to have Human Resources, or whatever department's publication you are using, review your pages, just to make sure they contain the most current and accurate information. The beauty of an intranet is how easy it is to change information when it goes out of date.)
• Easily written by you. This is probably going to be all of the image captions, the opening statements, the filler, as I like to call it.
• Needs to be written by another individual. For example, the Project pages for Projects 1-3. The project leaders can write these themselves. Who else knows more about the project than the people running it? (No laughing out there!) A note here, project leaders tend to be very busy, and you will want to ask nicely, and make sure you give the leader a good amount of time to put together the content.

Once you have all of your content, all you have to do is open the page it belongs on and type it in. Save your new page and you are ready to roll.

Customizing the site

First, if you don't need all of the pages on the autosite, simply delete the ones you don't need and they will be removed from the site and the navigational links will be removed as well.

Second, if you need to add pages, this is quite easy. Go into Structure View, highlight the page you want your new page to be linked from, and select the New Page button. Your new page is added, with all of the autosite's style predefined. All you need to do is add your content.

Go to it…

That should be about it. With this information, you should be ready to build your first intranet and do it in record time. Good luck, and let me know how it works out!

About the author

JD Shipengrover has been in the Intranet developing business for over four years, including building a worldwide Intranet for CompuServe Inc.'s Customer Services department, (A project on such a large scale it took 2 years to complete!) Currently, she consults at BMW Financial Services, designing several Intranets for their dealer networks. She also teaches Web Site Design at a Columbus State Community College and has a BA in Journalism.

Illustration: Metropolis by Rob Porazinski from www.artville.com