Winning Intranet Designs

A study on Intranets design and use by Jakob Nielson showed that Intranets do further knowledge management, and that some companies designed interfaces for mobile phones.

10 Best Intranets of 2011 (Jan 4, 2011)

A Canadian law firm got onto the list -Bennett Jones LLP (Canada)=. Verizon and Credit Suisse are on the list for the second time.

+ 60% of winners had a mobile version - they focused on features of greatest importance to their uses.
+ all winners did "knowledge management" well that included six "solutions": knowledge sharing, innovation management (or innovation support), comments from readers, rating systems - involves users and improves rankings, rewards for participation, and employees could customize collections. Many of these are enterprise 2.0 type of features. Intranets include blogs and video sharing and many features to encourage sharing.

Several trends are listed. Of interest - "Better-structured intranets based on task-centered IAs, often breaking up a legacy of information silos", and "Emphasis on search and on initiatives to improve search quality (which continues to suffer on many intranets). "

The 433 page report (which costs $248 ) has 218 screenshots of the winning designs.

Earley Jumpstart Series on Sharepoint

Earley and Associates has a new 4-part jumpstart series starting on Sharepoint 2011 - looking at "best practices for taking information organization and access to new levels, producing much greater value to businesses."

SharePoint 2010 - Architecting for Business Value, Earley and Associates

Topics:

* SharePoint 2010 - Best Practices for Creating Business Value (March 3)
* Methods and Tools for Better SharePoint Search (March 10)
* Practical Approaches to Developing Rich Information Architectures (March 17)
* The Role of Governance in Ensuring Success (March 24)

Free with registration - can't beat that.

SEO Audit, Site Architecture, Taxonomies

Taxonomies are important in website architecture for navigation (as we know) and in search engine optimization.

How To Do An SEO Audit by Michael Martinez, SEO Case Studies,SEO Metrics (March 7, 2011)

In this article about the reasons for conducting an SEO audit on a website and the steps to do so.

Site architecture is arguably one of the most important parts - along with keyword analysis.

"Toponymy defines how things are named. Taxonomy defines how things are organized. Toponymy tells you what keywords are used in the URL and page names. Taxonomy tells you how the folders and sub-domains are sorted and arranged in the site’s hierarchy. Navigation tells you which pages and sections are most important to any page."

Overall, article will be of some interest to the information professional in considering taxonomies, keywords, and content.