Your intranet should adhere to your brand standards. If you do not have formal brand standards, colors and fonts from your internet site or logo can be repurposed. We always have a dedicated graphic designer work on the branding, layout, and overall look and feel of the sites we implement. Our clients sometimes push back against spending time on branding, and understandably so.
Executives are used to making decisions based on concrete future cash flows and calculated rates of return, but the ROI of branding is elusive.
The key thing to remember (and this is backed up by research) is that users think of SharePoint as a website, since it is accessed through a web browser and often behaves like a website. This leaves users unimpressed when it doesn’t look and feel as good as a modern internet website.
Think of the last time you visited a beautiful website. A neurologist would tell you that the pleasing colors and clean layout caused a flood of dopamine to be released in your brain. Dopamine is the pleasure chemical, and its presence caused you to form an immediate and unconscious positive opinion of the website even before your conscious mind acknowledged the good design, and well before you assessed the usefulness of the content of the site. This is the feeling we want your users to have when they visit your intranet.
Spend some time on both look & feel and ease of use by branding the intranet with company colors, implementing an attractive and maintainable custom top-navigation, and using consistency in the placement of certain elements.
Before you implement a new SharePoint site, you should ask yourself the following questions:
• Do we have established brand standards?
• Will colors and fonts need to come from another source, such as a logo or internet site?
• Are you willing to allocate the budget to produce a pleasing design for your users?
• Does the project team have experienced graphic and user experience designers?
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Our relationship with our clients often begins when they notice something that they’re not quite happy with within their SharePoint environment. Maybe it’s slow performance, or maybe things have gotten a little bit out of control with the number of sites, subsites, or the way documents have been stored. We can help figure out how to maintain your ROI, how to increase user adoption, and figure out what’s wrong with your SharePoint environment.
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