Tips for Effective Corporate Intranet Web Sites

How to create exciting online experiences,
dazzle your manager,
and avoid personal responsibility through creative Web authoring.

All of the following examples are true: actually found on corporate web sites.

1. Always create your site with frames, Flash, or other technologies that prevent visitors from bookmarking pages. This way, if your information is wrong, nobody can ever find it again.

2. Put a huge Flash animation on your home page so people have to load and view that fabulous thing every time they visit. We'll never tire of seeing your state-of-the-art, best-of-breed logo animation that, personally, puts "The Phantom Menace" to shame. Now fill your home page with unique links (i.e., not available on your sub-pages) so we have to return and watch that precious animation repeatedly. Woo-hoo, I love a special effects extravaganza while I'm trying to get work done.

3. You must include at least one scrolling banner to draw your visitors' attention away from the main content of the page. The best is a scrolling stock ticker, because they are just so novel, and God knows we all need to see the company stock price throughout the day on our intranet. Especially after market hours. Bonus points: add your local weather report to satisfy the burning curiosity of your worldwide visitors.

4. Your material should always refer to itself. Web pages must begin, "This web page is to inform you that...."

   And while you're at it:

   • Memos must begin, "This memo says..."
   • Emails must start with, "Read this email for important information."
   • Termination notices must begin, "You have just been handed a termination notice that says..."

   Oh yeah, and all paychecks should be conspicuously emblazoned, "This is a paycheck of cash money to be paid to you at."

5. Use lots of filler words. Don't simply say:

   Visit our site.

   Ho-hum. Instead say:

   If you want to learn more about the topic that our site is about, make sure that you CLICK HERE so you can visit our incredible Flash 'n Frames information center, access all of our web resources, and read the words that appear in your browser window!!!

6. Teach visitors how to use their web browsers. If your site has documentation, don't just make a link like this:

   Documentation

   That is way too confusing. Instead, write:

   If you want to see some documentation about our site, click HERE.
   Please click the above link to access the documentation.

7. Tell your visitors how to navigate to particular destinations:

   To contact customer service, click Help, then Customer Service, then choose Contact from the drop-down menu under Tasks.

   These detailed instructions are way more effective than, say, making your site easily navigable. Never mind that the instructions won't stay in people's heads and will become obsolete when the site changes.

8. Include your company name as often as possible. Especially on your intranet! So what if we're firewalled off so only company employees can read your pages? Keep writing:

   Acme Widgets welcomes you to the Acme Widgets department of Acme Widgets Branding!

9. Obfuscate language whenever possible. Begin all sentences with "Pursuant to the fact that...."

10. When you make an important change on your site, send email to the whole company about it, so ten thousand browsers hit your site simultaneously. Make sure you don't have the bandwidth to handle this traffic. Thus, people will tire of waiting for your page to load, click Stop, and within a few minutes forget about your announcement. Congratulations: you've successfully made yourself look good to your management (by sending the announcement) without the burden of actual visitors to your site.

11. Capitalize random Words to make Them Somehow more Important. (We call this the "Winnie The Pooh" syndrome.)

12. Decorate your home page with self-congratulatory material. Don't forget your all-important Mission Statement. We love it. More, more.

13. Speaking of that Mission Statement, you get bonus points if it doesn't actually mention work. For example:

    Mission Statement: To serve our clients with true dedication, leveraging effective solutions behind sound business practices, in accordance with strict adherence to the Principles of our Company. Dude!

14. Include an organizational chart. Make sure the design differs from every other org chart in your company. And don't keep it up to date.

15. Include a Search feature, but index only 10% of your content. Make sure that obvious searches fail: the names of your products, your chief officer's name, etc. Redirect all failed searches to your Mission Statement page.

16. It is mandatory for any intranet site, especially a new one, to have at least one glaring bug. Keep your visitors on their toes! Particularly effective bugs are:
    • An immediate runtime error on the first page, which demonstrates your incredible QA diligence. (We love "index.asp: Object Not Found.")
    • A long sequence of forms to fill out, followed by a final Save button that doesn't work.
    • A Submit button that spews reams of raw HTML or JavaScript into the browser window.

17. Don't include a Contact or Feedback link. Those pesky users should learn to keep their selfish complaints to themselves.

18. If you must allow feedback, let it be submitted only through an eccentric Problem Report web form. Suppress page-caching, so if the user browses away (to confirm the problem) and comes back, anything typed so far is gone. Make sure that clicking the Submit button throws a runtime error, and then present a confirmation page that the message was successfully sent. We love ambiguity.

19. Mandate that all your intranet sites must work with Internet Explorer. Then announce your mandate on a web page that crashes IE but works fine in Netscape.

20. Duplicate browser functionality. Place buttons on your pages to perform the same functions as the browser's standard buttons, such as Back, Print Page, and Close Window. Make sure yours don't work. (Or at least make them work less efficiently or predictably.)

21. Arbitrarily eliminate scrollbars and resizing gadgets on popup browser windows. Then fill the popup pages with content too large to fit in the window.

22. Use the <blink> tag. On capitalized text. In a scrolling banner.

23. Begin your home page text with the exclamation, "Congratulations!" Hey, your visitors worked so hard, clicking that link to reach your site, that they should be lauded for their monumental achievement.

24. Encourage repeat visits. When you perform an http redirection to another page within your site, be sure to append the redirector to the browser's history list. Now, users cannot leave your site via the browser's Back button. You know they want to stay! And what's this newfangled "location.replace" thingy anyway?

25. Give visitors the exciting, mind-blowing news that your web site is available "24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anytime, whenever they want, wherever they are." How truly unique! Call the Wall Street Journal!

26. Blame your visitors to escape responsibility. Need to announce a draconian new policy at the last minute? Post it on your web site, calling it a "reminder." Hey, now it's not your fault for procrastinating, it's everybody else's fault for forgetting!

27. Pursure kwality. Create a new web site announcing your "Six Sigma" corporate quality initiative. Riddle the site with HTML errors.

28. Kwality part 2. Run a web-based survey to evaluate your Six Sigma initiative. Mess up your DNS so badly that the web site is unreachable.

Remember: these are all true!