7 Tips to Make a Respectable Sharepoint Site Fast

Two things I love about my job in marketing and communications: learning new things and building. This applies to developing strategy and to tactical things, like implementing a new tool to help our operations. This post is about the latter, and I titled it How to Make a Respectable Sharepoint Site Fast because it's all about helping you get your site up and running fast. I'm not promising the world's greatest design since I'm not a designer, but I'm confident with these steps you'll build something that makes you proud. It’s been awhile since I created a Sharepoint site, so I was essentially starting from scratch. But, it's an easy tool to pick up again, and I had fun getting it live for our region.

Through the process, I found the old adage measure twice, cut once applying to steps in creating the site.? Here are some quick tips to make your Sharepoint site building process super simple.

#1.? ?Define the purpose of the site first. Our team went in with a problem and identified the Sharepoint tool as a solution to help us better communicate across the organization. Our site is intended to be the permanent historical system of record for all things regional Marketing for Ascom Americas and replaces a variety of places to store and direct users to information, like our personal OneDrives files and shared Marketing folder on a common drive. ?The Sharepoint site functions as a map to guide people to which assets exist, the context around why we created them and how they’re to be used. It puts everything we’re doing into context in real-time to enable others (as well as ourselves) to be more informed and self-sufficient in finding what they need. I encourage you and your team to first define the purpose - the why – you want to create a Sharepoint site. This will inform the decisions you make around content storage and the page design and help you communicate and get buy-in across your organization.

#2. Map the structure of your Intranet site. I’m a fan of GloomMaps to map your entire site structure. It’s easy to use without a tutorial. The boxes are simple to plug information into, and you can sign up and get several maps for free. It’s also easy to share your map across your organization with an email link to get feedback. This will help you visualize how the parts of your site fit together and how many sections, pages and sub-pages you’ll need to create too. Use it to visually show others and get alignment across your organization on the main sections and headers so you don’t have to spend time later moving sections around (although that is easy, it’s still more efficient to stick to your outline). Your site likely isn’t the only one in the organization, so make sure you and others know how traffic can flow between your pages. If you’re just designing pages within a site or a section of a site, this level of mapping may be overboard, but it depends on how many pages you think you want and need to create.

#3. Map again. This time your content. Use a program like Lucidchart to design your pages – what content goes where and what your intended design looks like one level deeper than your site structure map. While Lucidchart has many templates to choose from, I like choosing a blank page and just designing from there when you don’t have designated design templates from within your organization to use.

Here’s an example of one of the pages I created.

A note on design – while Sharepoint makes design simple with a set of defined choices in how to display content (the hard part sometimes is picking which design you like best), you could go two routes – 1. Make the design “pop” as much as you can or 2. Make the design as simple as possible. #1 could be really impressive, but I opted for #2 because I wanted anyone on our team to be able to edit and create pages without having to refer to a design guide that got really granular on the look and feel of each element.

Decide which, if any, content you have on former Sharepoint sites that need to be migrated to the new one and work with your IT team to migrate that content. Consider how much content you already have existing and what must be created as new as well as what needs continual updating. Define who is going to be doing this for your team/function so one person becomes the expert on editing the Intranet. Now is also the time to think about site permissions. This means who can read, edit and create pages. We define permissions at the data file level and site level – doing so at the page level is just too much detail to manage.

#4. Browse for inspiration. I realize the Intranet is an internal resource, so it’s not always easy to check out example sites and pages. However, you can get inspiration on design, layout and content by watching tutorials or searching for top Sharepoint page design. You can get ideas on what you want to do and what you don’t want to do, which is equally important. I had the benefit of reviewing other region and functional areas that went live on our updated Intranet before creating our regional Marketing site.

#5. Go for consistency in design elements, but don’t be captured by brand requirements. Follow your brand CVI guidelines, style guidelines, templates, etc. – whatever your organization has in place; however, know that given the restrictions on what Sharepoint allows you to design, it would be difficult to ensure your Intranet site resembles the higher brand customization of your external website. That said, having guidance across the organization for ensuring consistency across Sharepoint elements like which icons represent certain types of content, which colors to use for icons/button/etc. backgrounds, are important to make all areas (owned and created by different people) of your Sharepoint website look unified. Using brand images is a great way to personalize what could be a generic site.

Developing common templates for most frequently created content across teams is also helpful to have. From a marcomm perspective, some of those core elements would be around Awards, Quick Links and Campaigns. For our regional site we specified some common design elements for introductory pages for each function. This includes using a 5-window hero image on homepages for each function to show it’s the start of a journey for a visitor to that section. We also put contacts at the bottom of a page in a blue footer. We make quick links with a grey background and use the black pre-set icons (we only use picture images for links icons for social media). We made our homepage template available to teams so they could easily populate their content without spending a lot of time replicating design features, and we created a secondary template for sub-pages, although teams can play with layouts that fit their content as they like on sub-pages.

The design philosophy is about making the page easily skimmable with key sections labeled so a visitor doesn’t have to scroll a lot down the page. For pages that have a lot of information needing to be categorized by year, we use the collapse function within the sections, and we default to make it collapsed upon view.

#6. Watch a how video to before you click - create new page. Spend 20 minutes upfront watching a tutorial about how to get started. It's time well spent. I liked this one by Mr. Exham’s EdTech – Ultimate Guide to Sharepoint pages. Seeing someone walk through the button clicks when you’re unfamiliar with the mechanics of page creation is really helpful, and it increases my confidence when I hit start on a blank page.

#7. Get feedback before you launch. It’s always good to test your site with others, especially those who will use it frequently. Check how easily they can find information on your site and for missing content. We got feedback on the naming of one of our content buckets, which caused us to change the name Regional Content to General Content after hearing some people may think the information refers to content generated by our Global Marketing and Communications teams. Remember your site and pages are dynamic. You can always iterate and make changes as you go. And don’t forget to check the Sharepoint analytics for insight on which pages are performing well and use those insights to inform future changes you make.

Happy creating!

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