Balancing Updates With Usefulness
Adrian Sutton
When the homepage is dominated by news you are not necessarily communicating more. In many situations, you are damaging your reputation as a quality news source. Forcing news into people’s faces just annoys them. The fact is, most intranets really don’t have that much news that’s globally interesting, so most intranets need to focus on the commonly used resources or the targeted information that’s specific to smaller groups – often that’s not PR written news or even news at all, more just status updates.
The article actually reminds me of my uni days running the semi-official intranet for the university residences (the year I started uni was the first year they had networking in the residences). It always felt like a constant battle to ensure that the news that made it up there was always worth reading and always very well written given the audience. It worked amazingly well – even people who didn’t have a computer on the network would read the latest news about the res network either on a friends computer or from the campus computer labs.
It’s not easy to achieve that kind of consistent quality (I don’t even try on this blog…) and you always come across as being exceptionally picky in the process but it pays off because it shows you value your readers time.