Top 10 Tips to design a SharePoint Intranet in 2023 | SharePoint Intranet Examples

hi it's Dougie wood and in this video I'm going to be talking to you about some great top tips for when you're designing your new SharePoint online Intranet the first thing that I want to talk about is designing your SharePoint internet home page with vertical sections so let's take a quick look at this now what we mean by a vertical section is this bar that we see on the right hand side now this is something which you can only get with this modern SharePoint user interface and it's really useful because it breaks out the content the main body of the content which is almost like the two-thirds of the width of the page on the left hand side from a sort of secondary content area now I like to use this with an internet in conjunction with having a slider or something like that that's Visual and it's providing that kind of need for news or information with a more functional web part like a quick links for example we've got links on here because a true SharePoint internet needs to have the right balance between two things communication and navigation so providing people the latest information news articles documents and policies and procedures and all that good stuff but also the functional elements of actually helping people navigate to things as well and using different navigational elements throughout the intranet now to add a vertical section is really easy when you edit a page and you go into edit mode you'll notice that you can add sections to the page using this plus button on the left hand side one of the options is a vertical section now because I've already got this added it's obviously grayed out but if I was just to remove that section you'll then see I can now add the vertical section back onto the page and it gives me that bar on the right hand side I can then add web parts to it like I can do with anywhere else on SharePoint just by click on the little plus button I can type in a web part and that'll then add that to that particular vertical section on the page I'm just going to discard the changes because I don't want to get rid of I don't want to save the changes there but you can see it's a really good way of actually putting in information onto a page and it means that you can put two different types of information on a page and it visually breaks up so as you're kind of scrolling through the page you've got a secondary area on the right hand side which could have totally different type of content so subliminally people are actually realizing that that's a different type of content so um the kind of content on the left hand side so it might be that you break out to say more kind of visual things will be on the left hand side more the functional navigational items might be on the right hand side but this is a great way of breaking out and getting more on the page as well so if you're not really a fan of the designs which have a lot of scrolling in SharePoint then having there's vertical sections on the right hand side is a great way of getting that content on a page without having to have too much scroll the next thing to be thinking about is the use of videos inside of your internet now video content is getting a lot more popular and actually Microsoft are already ahead of the game with this because they have a product inside of Microsoft 365 which is called stream which is basically a little bit like YouTube in the sense that you can build out playlists of videos and then you can embed either the whole playlist or an individual video directly into your SharePoint Intranet now these could be all sorts of different types of videos these could be videos um which are um like onboarding videos so new starters which are joining and you want them to sort of watch a handful of kind of videos um they could be like health and safety videos um there could be a whole host of different things but you can have them sort of then put into a playlist inside of stream and then embedded into SharePoint so this video I'm not going to go really in depth about stream because it is a different product but essentially you can get to stream just by going to office.com uh searching for uh stream and that'll then take you to the stream interface and I say you can build out channels of videos almost like playlists and upload different kind of videos in there at the moment it's worth noting that at the time of recording um that SharePoint will only allow you to embed um videos from classic stream stream is actually currently in the process of being upgraded um so the videos have to sit in a classic kind of interface rather than the modern interface if you want to embed them into SharePoint but it's really easy to embed them into SharePoint all you need to do is click on edit and then we add a web part to a page and let's say for example you might want to add some videos here we just look for the stream web part click on stream and you'll see then it'll automatically pull through all the videos which are occurring inside of stream uh which actually I don't have any videos in here at the moment and we can go into editing this web part and we can choose whether we have a all of stream and then everything into the stream a single video so just one video now this could be really useful if you wanted to have like a CEO update or something like that or messages from the management team so rather than having like a newsletter or a bulletin or something like that just a short video which maybe a senior member of the management team is recording even from their phone um they can upload it into stream and embed it directly into the intranet home page or you can have a channel so it might just be like um some latest kind of videos as I say some onboarding videos training videos that sort of thing we're going to bed directly into here now before I move on to the next kind of top tip I'll also mention as well you can embed YouTube videos so if you don't want to use stream you can use a YouTube web part to do exactly the same thing the only thing is you do need to paste in um either the URL or an embed code that's generated from YouTube but it can basically do exactly the same thing so on to number three top tip call to actions now like with anything if if you're from a kind of web development background you'll know the phrase call to actions as something that you want the user of the web page to do so it might be for example a traditional website it would be say contact us or call now or um submit a question or something like that whereas in an intranet it might be for example um you want a button which is going to take them directly to policies it might be a button which is going to open up some marketing materials for example so let's take a little look again um at that internet home page now I've actually got some call to actions uh on here already like policies uh marketing materials forms for people to jump directly into and then click on the open button and that will then launch them directly to those particular things but this could be all sorts of different things right it could be used for feedback on the internet home page it could be a link to a whistleblowing form or something like that now we can use this to either link to a hyperlink so maybe it's linking to a SharePoint site or a page a file or a folder or even external web page as long as it's got hyperlink a URL you can you can put it into these buttons the other cool thing as well as you can also automatically get it to open up an email for you as well so if I just click on this edit button here let's say for example we want to add another call to action but I'm going to add it underneath here I'm going to click on ADD web part find the call to action web partner you'll notice it's responsive right so it'll fit the space that you give it so it's really wide because it's in this full width section whereas if I add it on the right hand side it's going to be much smaller um now I can add in some text so this might be do you have a question for example so just type into that black box now if we want to update the button link or where it's going to the hyperlink we can click on this edit web part and then you've got this button label so this might be say contact us and we could provide a link to Google for example and you can now see it's now a clickable button so now if I republish and I click on that button it's then going to open up in a browser Google as my hyperlink I can also get this to open up an email so if I wanted to email this to a certain mailbox I can just type in mail to like this and then I type in an email address so I'll just put Dougie at example .com and then when I click on republish what will then happen is when I click on contact us it'll then automatically launch an email in my uh the desktop computer it's opened up Outlook and it's going to send an email directly to that mailbox so this is a great idea if you're wanting to submit a sort of it's almost like a feedback type of form or if it's um a like a general kind of question or something like that we can also change the background image so by selecting on the web part um we can change the background image of this um by clicking on the change button across the top we can either upload our own images or we can choose the stock image Library which is really good actually and we can let's say for example I actually notice of the day there's some nice cool background pictures of just concrete which actually work really well as a kind of textured image in the background of these call to actions so when you click on republish there we go we now got our call to action do you have a question you click on contact us and it'll automatically open up an email to the designated mailbox so the next top tip is to use SharePoint news rollups now if you're not already doing this or you're considering building out a new shape or Internet it's worth thinking about news rollups so what we mean by this is having a news web part on your internet home page which is then pulling up content from other areas of the internet so let's take a look so back on our internet home page I'm just going to scroll down a little bit and you can see here we've got this news web part now this news web part isn't just pulling out news articles from this particular SharePoint site typically when I design an internet homepage like this the top sort of scrolling news of banner so these are links news articles if I click on one it will open up the full news article now the slide across the top is typically for like everybody in the organization right so it's content which is everybody's going to be interested in and want to see whereas further down this news web part is usually more of a roll-up from news articles which are um created in other areas of the internet because your SharePoint Internet isn't just one site it's usually an internet home page and then you'd have Department sites or business unit sites or sites for projects or initiatives or whatever it is but they're usually sites around other topics and then you can create news articles on those sites and then roll them up so you can see here this new starter um news article is actually being created on the operation site we've got news articles pulling from the finance site as well or the marketing side of the human resources like these are all the different SharePoint sites that I have inside of my internet and I'm rolling up those news articles now it's really easy to configure this we just need to edit the web part by editing the page then selecting the web part and then you can see the new new source across the top now we can either say this site which will only show me news articles created from this particular site or actually all sites in the hub which will include the current site so the internet home page as well as all the other sites which are linked to this or basically Associated to this via the Hub site settings and if you're not too sure what I mean by Hub sites I have a couple different videos which explain what a SharePoint hot plot is as well as how to create a hub site um so go and check those out and that'll explain a bit more about what Hub sites are but essentially The Hub site is your intranet home page and then you have sites which associate to that or we can specify selected sites if I only wanted news to come from finance and operations I can select those two sites and then you can see here it's only pulling through content or rolling up those news content from those particular areas I can also specify different layouts at the moment I've got Hub news but say if I wasn't having as many news articles I might want to have a top story or again you could have a carousel a side by side tiles which look a bit like the hero web part there's a couple of different options that we've got here that we can display it's going to go back and actually just say this is all sites in the hub but when you're thinking about this news roll up you want to be thinking about how much content is actually going to be created because I've seen a lot of people go a bit nuts with this and they think oh yeah well there's going to be loads of news articles that are going to be created and sometimes there is for the first few weeks that people love using SharePoint straight away and they want to use it but eventually they I mean they get drawn back into their day-to-day job and they don't have as much time to be creating these articles so the worst case scenario is that you get an intranet where say for example it's mid-august and you've still got news articles on here which is talking about Christmas parties from eight months before so you don't want to have stagnant news on your internet homepage so when you're thinking about roll up think about how much content is likely going to be created um because let's say for example if you're going to create a news article of uh every day um then you're going to get five news articles that appear on here fresh every single week whereas if you're going to be creating one a month um then it's going to take for example what we can count here one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven and actually there's a 12 slot here so it's gonna take a full year if you're only going to create a news article once um a month uh for that news article to drop off because as you add new news articles they will slide along so as a news one it will push this one to the right and then all the way up in this one will then join here and go down and eventually it'll drop off the side so if you're only going to create one once a month you're probably better having something which has got something like this top news story so then that actually we're only showing four on these articles so a news article would only stay here um for four months before it dropped off the page or we could say we have a list uh View and we sort of draw this down so we're gonna have two news articles so two months in that example so the points am I waffling anyway is to to try and get the point across that think about how much news content you're actually going to create and then let that be what makes the decision about what the the Roll Up is going to look like uh based on the amount of number of news articles you're going to have on your home page and whilst we're on the topic of SharePoint news I want to talk a little bit about SharePoint newsletters because again although this is not necessarily a feature of a SharePoint internet home page it's a great way when you're first designing your SharePoint internet to be transitioning people from using things like emails and things like that for getting newsletters and information to using SharePoint so you've got to transition them from using emails into SharePoint so a great way to do this is actually if you go to your news web part you'll see here a see all button now you'll only see that see all button if the amount of news articles exceeds what you can display on this page so I can only display four news articles on here but I've got say 11 news articles potentially that could be pulled through so now it's saying see all so when I click on that see all button that's going to take me to a page where I can see all the news articles that could potentially be displayed on that home page now you'll see across the top we've got this email and News Digest button now this is a great way of actually creating a newsletter from content you've already got and then emailing it to people so people who are already used to receiving emails as that way of receiving newsletters will get that and get a short summary of text that they can then click through and it will open up the internet from this so all I need to do is choose a couple of news articles that I want to put into my newsletter then I'm going to click on the next button across the bottom right corner and it's going to ask me to provide a title for my newsletter so I might call this my winter newsletter whoops clicked away from that too early and specify who I'm going to send this to so for now I'm just going to specify myself and then um this is some text I'm just going to put in some body text to show you what it would look like once I received this so once I've created this I can choose to move around the news articles if I want to do or add or remove some and then click on send and use digest and this is going to automatically then generate an email from a template put those news items into that as well as that text and then send it to whoever I've put in that box that's not going to send a email which looks a little bit like this now it's very generic it's very neutral looking so it's not going to clash with any of your um kind of brand colors or things like that at the moment at the time of recording you can't really change this templates layout it's supposed to be really simple really basic really easy to use but as you can see it's very neutral it's not going to clash with anything too much here's the text here's some of the links to those news articles or we can always click on go to site which again is a great kind of call to action to get people to actually boost the traffic to your internet home page so we're just about halfway through now um I just wanted to remind you to subscribe to my channel um if you do like this video please do like if you've got any questions or any other kind of top tips that you'd like to share with building out share my Internet please use a comment feed below but please do subscribe because um it really does help the channel grow so the next top tip is SharePoint event web parts so event web Parts can be added again anywhere on your internet home page I like to have them nearer the bottom and it's really easy to add a new event you just click on the add event button and then you're presented with a little bit like a form that you have when you're setting up an Outlook event so let's just say this is going to be uh maybe we're going to do a charity uh fundraiser we can specify a background image so again click on stock images or upload your own images if you want to so let's just put in here charity select an image clicking on insert we can specify a date or when this is going to be so this could be say for example it's going to be July 11th and it's going to be from 3 30 to 5 30 p.m we can specify where it's going to be so we can actually provide an address and this will then show us a little map of where it's going to be we can provide a link so say for example this might be a link to an online registration form more information a website it could even be a teams link if this was a virtual event it might be a link to a team's meeting we can specify categories which you can change by the way I'm not gonna have time in this video to show you but you can change these categories as well so we can say this is a get together quite a bit of text since this is some text again just like with any kind of Microsoft product you've got bold italic online different types of fonts and then you can specify in here event participants so who's actually coming to the event then once you create an event just click on Save and that's going to create your event and it will very shortly publish onto the events home page here the other cool things as well with the event web part if we're just going to edit mode edit this you can also see we can specify the source as well so I can either say just events which are created on this site or I could specify to say events um on a particular list or I could say all Sites or say all sites in the hub which again is going to roll up news uh sorry events from other SharePoint sites which Associated to this Hub site there's different types of layouts as well you could have a compact layout or a film strip layout if you wanted a little bit bigger as that it can just take a few minutes for the event just to show up on the web part but when it does what's really cool is there's also like a little sort of add to my calendar button which will appear and when you click on that a user will then automatically be able to add that event into their own Outlook calendar as a reminder the next top tip is SharePoint drop down menus so these are called Hub site navigation bars some people refer to them as Mega menus but they're a great way to boost the navigation of your SharePoint Intranet what I mean by this is this navigation bar across the top so you can see I've got departments I've got news I've got apps and as you can see it is a mega menu you can have up to three tiers of navigation you've got news you've got UK news and you've got uh BBC so these are three different layers they can all be clickable or what we call labels which are non-clickable pieces of text like this UK news for example and we can link to anything which has got a hyperlink it could be um something internal like a SharePoint site a page a file a folder or it could be something external like a BBC News or CNN news or another third-party web page it's really easy to edit and update just click on this edit button here and we can add links by click on this little plus button the pop-up box appears and we can either choose whether it's a link or a label which is a non-clickable piece of text we put in our Link in here the display name then click on OK and then it'll add it now the way that the hierarchy of these kind of navigation works is the further left a link is the higher up it is in the navigation and anything which is then indented underneath it is a Child Link so for example Finance is a Child Link of departments and you can have that up to three layers so we've got news UK news and US News which is that a second layer and BBC and CNN which is at that other third layer you can move them up and down by clicking on Three Dots and click on promote sublink to move it left or right so if I now click on Save you'll now see that that news link uh BBC sorry um you see is now no longer on the UK news it's now at this layer or I can edit it click on make sub link click on Save and that will move it then back underneath here it's really important to get your navigation right um and that and actually having this kind of Mega menu can make it really easy for people to find things you've probably heard this kind of concept before that people don't want to click more than three times to actually find content and actually using this drop down menu makes it much easier so rather than me having to click into so let's say for example there's some like policies there's a link onto HR so rather than having to click departments and then HR then policies and then something else we can jump directly into policies with skipping out a couple of different clicks at number eight is Department SharePoint site templates so what I mean by this is actually when you're designing your intranet it's not just about designing an internet home page it's also worth thinking about having a standardized Department template which you can then reuse to create multiple different department areas so typically your Internet isn't just your internet home page you have these Department areas say like Finance HR marketing I.T but it's better to actually design an in a department home page which is then reused across all those different department sites so that when you're jumping between different departments actually the layout stays the same and it doesn't get um disjointed or people feeling confused because different sites look wildly different I've seen internets in a lot of different ways but I tend to find that the adoption is much easier for people when the department sites all look the same so that they they know actually when they go to a department site they know where they can find um sort of information on the leadership of that department they know the bio of that department the events or the documents that they're they're sort of providing and the news so there's a couple of different sort of aspects of this and once you've kind of got that department home page right you can then use um something like power automate to copy that home page so you create multiple Department sites and then you could use what the sort of templated site that you've you've created to then copy between those different sites I do actually have a specific video which is all about how to copy SharePoint Pages using power automate so once you've created your template here go and watch the other video and that will actually tell you how to copy those home pages between your different SharePoint sites and number nine we've got SharePoint FAQs uh using SharePoint sections now FAQs are a staple of a SharePoint intranet which is trying to provide knowledge because one of the main things that SharePoint internet should do is cut down on frequently asked questions or people being bothered with phone calls or emails and things like that specifically you see FAQs being set up within um a department site because often questions are usually directed to departments specifically or people within a department so having FAQs on there can be really useful again I do have a full video which talks all about SharePoint FAQ so I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail with this but just to show you how quick and simple it is to create faq's using sections on a page I'm going to edit this page here and then I'm going to scroll to the bottom and then usually you'll have FAQs right at the bottom of the department page so I'm going to click on add a new section I like the one third left option because um this is where we can add in an image add a bit of text we're going to edit the section to make it collapsible and then the section name is going to be the sort of question so how do I ABC we're then going to put an image which is going to illustrate this point so I'm going to put an image web part and then I'm going to select a stock image and I'm going to select a picture of something so actually top tip as well if you can search for topics in here you can find images related to things let's just say for example I'm going to select this laptop click on insert and then there's my image I can add in some text so add a text web part and then again this is some text there we go in fact actually what I'll do as well I saw something cool the other day which look quite good I'm going to add a button web part now button webpart is literally just it's smaller than a call to action one part simply just a button um so I might as a more info button and then again just put a fake Link in here for now and that's then gonna that could then click off and Link you to somewhere else now the final things that I'm going to do for my FAQ is I'm just going to make this uh section expanded by default but I want to make it stand out from the rest of the page so I'm going to actually make this a slightly light green option and then what I'm going to do is replicate this so typically you'd have multiple FAQs on a page so you want to have loads I wouldn't recommend having say any more somewhere between five and ten is probably about the sweet spot but you can duplicate a section so you can keep that same layout so now I can say uh change this to maybe something like when is um it going to be one two three we can change the image obviously um so change this image and then change the text as well if we wanted to but the the main thing is with this is I would choose the the maybe have the top FAQ open but then the other FAQ I would actually make them automatically uh oops collapsed rather than expanded so now I'm just going to duplicate this out a couple more times so change these questions so what does it mean to one two three um duplicate section how do I request uh ABC duplicate one more time how do I get one two three approved blah blah there we go so now when I click on republish that's then going to republish and now you can see my FAQs at the bottom and I can choose to open and close them just by clicking on the title of the FAQ you can also see here a little sort of like hyperlink button will appear and that just means we can actually use this as like an anchor to a page as well so if I want if this was a very large page of a lot of different FAQs I could maybe anchor to a specific one from a button at the top of the page just by clicking on this link to copy the actual anchor URL the final top tip is SharePoint stock images as you've seen when I've been editing images and click on the change using stock image library is really good you can search based on topics like office or car it could be a color so like orange and you'll find loads of images in here so rather than thinking about all these different images you've got to get together before you build or design your intranet you can rely on Microsoft stock image Library I hope you found that useful if you did please like And subscribe to the channel for future top tips if you've got any questions or thoughts then use a comment box below thank you very much for watching

Channel: Dougie Wood

Views: 21,920

Keywords: sharepoint, intranet, sharepoint intranet, sharepoint online, microsoft sharepoint, sharepoint intranet templates, intranet sharepoint, sharepoint tutorial, sharepoint intranet examples, sharepoint intranet example, sharepoint intranet portals, sharepoint intranet tutorial, sharepoint hr intranet portal, create a simple intranet portal in sharepoint, intranet examples, sharepoint office 365, how to use sharepoint, sharepoint online tutorial, sharepoint 2013, Dougie Wood

Id: GLQzB0pzmAk

Length: 30min 1sec (1801 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023