With the modern Microsoft SharePoint sites, you can publish news, share important information with your team or department, build a community, and spread important solutions in your company. But what does it take to create websites your employees love to work on?
Under the umbrella term of SharePoint development. the following three pieces of SharePoint site design advice will help you make your sites as interesting as possible:
- Decide what you want to show on the SharePoint sites
- Use visual elements wherever possible
- Familiarize yourself with hub sites
1. Decide what you want to show on the SharePoint sites
First, you need to decide what purpose you want your website to serve and what content you want to make available on it. Examples of websites that are commonly used include the following…
Intranet landing pages
For a landing page or welcome page, we at Al Rafay Consulting, as a SharePoint development consulting company, recommend using a modern SharePoint communication page. This is where your employees should be able to find news about your company, direct links to all the important resources, and maybe some personalized content.
The following web parts can help you with this:
- News web part
- direct links
- weather
- Recent Documents
- Yammer feed
- Twitter feed
Team or department websites
A team or department website is designed to encourage collaboration. This means that you should post all files important to the group, statistics related to your team’s work, information about upcoming events, and team-related news that is not relevant to the whole organization.
The following web parts can help you with this:
- News web part
- Recent Documents Web Part
- Power BI
- Events web part
- Featured Content
Solution pages
We all know the countless delivery service apps, e-learning platforms, or time tracking solutions built with SharePoint. But where should you put them?
One possible option for this is to build a solution page. For example, on an e-learning site, you can provide fun Microsoft Stream tutorial videos, quick links to further learning material, and the like.
Some web parts commonly used for eLearning solution pages are:
- Office 365 video
- News web part
- direct links
- YouTube
2. Use visual elements wherever possible
Corporate identity is important, but visual elements are even more important. There are several reasons to choose visuals over too much text. SharePoint development companies advise you to use visuals to make your sites more attractive to readers.
The average attention span of a reader on a page is only about 15 seconds. Meaningful images or symbols behind or next to the content that you would like to draw attention to are therefore absolutely necessary. Apart from that, the website looks more engaging, and welcoming and encourages your employees to stay and use it.
3. Familiarize yourself with hub sites
If you’re new to the hub site features in SharePoint Online, it’s time to explore them. SharePoint hub sites help you connect the navigational structures in your organization by linking sites together based on divisions and departments.
This makes it very easy for you to make navigating to the various hub member websites more user-friendly. Plus, you can easily aggregate news from all pages and handle navigation and branding.
Now you know what to do: Think about the purpose. Use as many visual elements as possible. And start using hubs to connect your SharePoint Online site collections.
The new SharePoint site collection feature is a major change from the classic site collections. It provides an easy way for users to create and manage site collections in a familiar SharePoint Online experience.
Final Thoughts
The above-mentioned three site designs are possible with SharePoint development tools and can be highly productive with the help of a professional SharePoint consultant. Al Rafay Consulting is one such consulting company that has experience in working with a number of satisfied clients and companies of all sizes.
We at ARC are committed to giving our clients the best productive ways to use SharePoint features which help them save time and money. For any queries and questions, please feel free to contact us to get a professional piece of advice.
Not using SharePoint yet but would like to migrate your files to SharePoint? Al Rafay Consulting with its SharePoint solutions can help. Our team of professional developers is always ready and committed to making SharePoint configurations according to your working style to provide you to ease of working.
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