Designing a Modern Intranet Website: Strategic Purposes, Best Practices & Feature Examples

Done well, a company intranet becomes the backbone of the digital workplace. Done poorly, it becomes a forgotten link on the bookmark bar.

In this article, we’ll explore the strategic purposes behind intranet design—paired with feature examples, best practices, and common mistakes to avoid. Whether you're building from scratch or redesigning an existing platform, these insights will help guide your journey. 

Intranet design isn’t just about branding or visual polish—it’s about enabling people to do their work better. A well-designed intranet delivers clear, accessible pathways to information, tools, and communication.

Our stance is that well-designed intranets:

✔ Improve how employees communicate and collaborate.

✔ Make essential information easier to find and act on.

✔ Encourage engagement and participation.

✔ Streamline internal processes and workflows.

✔ Reinforce your company’s identity and culture.

Good intranet design isn’t just about solution look and feel—it’s about how well it works for end-users. In short, good design = good usability. And usability will drive intranet and business value.

Learn more in this blog post: Top Intranet Design Ideas: Principles for Good Intranet Design.

Your intranet should do more than just "exist." It should serve clear business goals and employee needs. Below are the five core purposes of a modern intranet—each paired with the capabilities that bring them to life.

A modern intranet centralizes and streamlines communication, making it easy to share timely updates, company-wide messages, and personalized content across departments and locations. If you want to learn more, download this document: Improving Communication Practices with a Modern Intranet.

Editorial Hub: To support planning and publishing, your intranet should include an editorial hub, an intuitive content management system, and media management tools. Features like mandatory read confirmations, translation support, and AI-assisted content creation ensure consistent, multilingual communication.

Timely and Tailored Content: An integrated corporate calendar keeps everyone aligned. Personalized content consumption is enabled through subscriptions, notifications, and mobile access, with content tailored to each employee’s role or location. Dynamic content rollups and targeting rules ensure relevance.

Governance and Continuous Improvements: To monitor and improve, use analytics dashboards that surface insights on usage, engagement, search trends, and user behavior. And for strong governance, rely on content types, layout templates, metadata, multi-language support, publishing workflows, and an enterprise glossary to maintain clarity and consistency.

Image: Example of advanced media management

An engaging intranet helps employees feel connected to the company, their colleagues, and the overall mission.

Onboarding: This is especially valuable in hybrid or remote-first organizations. To support onboarding and introduction, use dedicated onboarding portals, structured schedules, org charts, tutorials, employee handbooks, and more.

Skills Development: Interactive tutorials and process visualizations help new hires feel at home quickly. For learning and development, provide a learning center with microlearning, video tutorials, course tracking, and competency profiles.

Knowledge Sharing: Allow for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing through social learning tools. In terms of recognition, let employees give public praise through shoutout features, highlight anniversaries and new hires, and surface top contributors via gamification elements.

Social Interactions: To support networking and inclusion, enable communities, forums, employee blogs, and social features like reactions, polls, and feedback channels—creating space for employee voices to be heard.

To learn more, download this document: Driving Employee Engagement with a Modern Intranet. 

Image: Conversation in knowledge sharing community

An intranet designed for operational excellence supports consistency, compliance, and standardization across processes and teams.

Manage Documents: Start with strong document management using templates, version control, and structured metadata. Incorporate approval workflows, archiving policies, and document histories for traceability and compliance. Learn more by downloading this document: How to Manage Controlled Documents in Microsoft 365.

Manage Processes: For process management, deploy visual process maps, linked documents, and suggested improvement channels. Process tracking ensures continuous improvement.

Manage Projects and Portfolios: In project management, leverage Teams templates, progress dashboards, and centralized documentation to standardize execution. Portfolio views give managers insight across projects.

Manage Tasks: In task management, enable employees with step-by-step instructions, sign-off requests, knowledge checks, and personalized task views—all with timely notifications.

Image: Example of project portfolio

Your intranet should help employees accomplish their work more easily by reducing friction and centralizing access to the tools and systems they rely on. Learn more in this blog post: Leveraging a Modern Intranet for Operational Excellence.

Mobile-first: For frontline support, a mobile-optimized app ensures that deskless workers can read news, react to updates, join discussions, and complete sign-off requests. Tools like QR code generators streamline access.

Customized Search: Improve findability with a customized search experience—using AI suggestions, search filters, and personalized notification panels. Analyze search behavior to fine-tune results over time.

M365 Integration: Ensure deep Microsoft 365 integration through Teams governance, app generators, and seamless links to Outlook, OneDrive, and SharePoint—making the intranet part of the flow of work.

Business Integration: Use digital workplace connectors to integrate with your CRM, HR systems, finance tools, or partner portals, turning the intranet into a centralized productivity hub.

Image: Example of AI-powered semantic search

Even the best content will go unused if the user experience is poor. That’s why intuitive, responsive, and personalized design is a critical component of intranet success.

Multi-channel: Targeting and multi-channel publishing ensures each message reaches the right person, through their preferred channel—email, Teams, mobile, or web.

Enhanced Findability: Flexible navigation options, including mega menus, contextual links, and task-focused layouts, help users explore and engage without friction. Personalized notifications alert users to relevant updates across platforms, while a customizable search experience ensures information is always within reach.

User-friendly Experience: And above all, a user-friendly design—with responsive layouts, clean pages, and personalized dashboards—ensures employees actually enjoy using the intranet.

Learn more about Omnia capabilities for a user-friendly intranet.

Image: Example of maga menu

Designing a great intranet isn’t just about features—it’s about solving real problems for real people. A strong design approach creates a better user experience and helps you avoid the common pitfalls that lead to low adoption, poor engagement, and wasted effort.

Here’s how to keep your intranet project on track—and what missteps these best practices are designed to prevent:

1. Design for your users—not your org chart: Build around user journeys and roles—not internal silos. Avoid the common pitfall of doing design without user input, which leads to misalignment and poor adoption.

2. Keep it simple and focused: Use clean layouts and prioritize clarity over complexity. Avoid the common pitfall of overloading the homepage and overwhelming users.

3. Embrace personalization: Let users customize their views and content feeds. Avoid the common pitfall of one-size-fits-all experiences that lead to disengagement.

4. Make it mobile-first: Ensure a seamless experience on smartphones and tablets. Avoid the common pitfall of an intranet that is inaccessible for hybrid and frontline teams.

5. Standardize templates and components: Maintain visual clarity and reduce design sprawl. Avoid the common pitfall of inconsistent experiences that confuse and frustrate users.

6. Build in governance: Assign content owners, set publishing workflows, and use lifecycle rules. Avoid the common pitfall of outdated or irrelevant content piling up over time.

7. Iterate based on real data: Use analytics and search behavior to guide continuous improvement. Avoid the common pitfall of launching and forgetting—missing the opportunity to evolve.

8. Plan your rollout and support: Engage champions, train users, and promote the intranet. Avoid the common pitfall of a silent launch with poor adoption and low visibility.

A successful intranet starts with purpose—and succeeds with thoughtful design. By aligning your intranet with core business goals like communication, engagement, productivity, and operational excellence, you turn it into a true enabler of your digital workplace.

Great intranet design is:

✔ Useful and intuitive.

✔ Personalized and inclusive.

✔ Scalable and well-governed.

✔ Integrated into the flow of work.

If your intranet isn’t delivering, the problem may not be technology—it may be design.

Looking to improve your intranet? Start by identifying your top organizational goals—and build from there with purpose-driven design and features that truly make a difference.

Need a deeper audit or redesign strategy? Why not start with a 30-minute free consultancy with one of our experts? Book your session with an Omnia Coach using this link.