Nonprofit web design

Baptcare is large nonprofit organisation providing care services in the state of Victoria, Australia. With over 760 staff based in several dozen locations, working in very different projects, good internal communication is vital. That’s why their Intranet is so important to them.

An Intranet is like a website except that it’s only available to people working within the organisation. It’s used to share information internally rather than to publicly promote the organisation’s services. Recently I designed their Intranet’s home page.

This is what the Intranet’s home page looks like since its redesign:

And this is what it looked like a month ago:

Bear in mind this is an Intranet, not a public website. It will only be used by staff, who see it every day and mostly use it to find information, forms and procedures. It needed a redesign but what were the main problems and how were they solved?

• Wasted space
  A huge photo took up most of the home page, wasting space that could be used to provide useful information.

  The design was simplified. The huge photo was removed and replaced with a much smaller image that actually had some relevance to our recent activities.
  

• Legibility
  The “quick links” section at the bottom-right was nearly illegible, with small text and not enough contrast between text and background colours. The menu buttons on the left-hand side were also difficult to read because a patterned background had been used.
  Menu buttons were made clearer by removing the patterned background and separating them from other images. Actually the buttons are a single image, with an accessible html image map that enables visitors to click through to other pages.
  The redesigned home page has a larger font-size. Darkgrey text on a white background makes it much easier to read than before.

• Out of date
  The home page was very static with little in the way of new content. Therefore staff might have assumed that nothing new was being published on the Intranet.

  The home page now automatically displays the most recent news items, events, vacancies and announcements as they are published in various sections of the Intranet. Automation has cut down on the amount of duplication involved.

  We also added an email link at the bottom of the page so that staff can suggest changes and send the editor new content for the site.

• Difficult to find information
  A real problem on an Intranet. Links were difficult to read, there were links to empty pages and the search facility was broken.

  I deleted all the redundant pages from the Intranet. The problem with the search facility was referred to Baptcare’s IT dept and to the web design company.

The Baptcare Intranet is based on IBM Websphere, a complex document management system. Redesigning the home page involved making changes to CSS and HTML and to various other files used in the Websphere templates.

There were limitations. I couldn’t make changes to the banner and menu at the top of the page because they have to stay the same as on other pages of the site.

Staff were given no warning that the Intranet home page was going through a redesign but they couldn’t help but notice the next time they opened their browser. All the comments so far have been complimentary and staff have told me they straight away went to see what was new and discovered content they’d not been aware of before. The new home page has succeeded in making the Intranet more accessible.

Published on May 8th, 2008.