Web Standards for big intranet landscape

One reason why a big company needs intranet is to organize their information, which increases dramatically every second. This job is done mostly by publishing information regarding the organization, projects, etc. in a structured way. Often, the final result is considered to be of greatest importance, at least in regard to the old fashioned way of building a website, where the site owner publishes the content for either personal or business purposes. Frequently, however, the creators of such websites lack a clear idea how to structure the code.

During the last 9 months, I dealt with 2 projects redesigning department intranet sites at Siemens Corporation in NJ, USA. This is not a big deal- those sites are only two of the thousands of other intranet sites within the Siemens network. Well, but not for me. One of them is now the first site that actually conforms to the Web Standards. Only one??? Yeah the other site I redesigned is within the corporate content management infrastructure. I was thus obligated to design the site their way � the old school way. I did some research on other intranet sites within the network, and after I saw what kind of code produced by the content management system the company used for the most of its intranet sites, I can conclude that they all are built in a very outmoded way: the deepest nested table that one can imagine, hundreds of GIF spacers, FONT tags everywhere, a code jungle where you are going to easily get lost.

Nowhere in the world, even before the end of the “browser war” is there a more suitable place to use the Web Standard than within an intranet network of a company. Most companies use one single browser, or let me say they declare one browser as a company browser. In the case of Siemens, it is Internet Explorer. That makes the work for Web Standards approach much easier because we don�t have to take into consideration the multi browser compatibility. They have a company design guideline that defines all specification of the all design element like width, grid, font size, color, content placement, etc. So all intranet sites look almost alike, the difference can take place in color scheme, visual elements, and of course, the content. The uniformity of the look and structure of the site should be an easy task for Web Standards:

• XHTML templates that matches the design guideline, the template can be modular so that site owner can leave some modules that they don�t want to use
• DIV can be used effectively for content holder instead of nested tables
• CSS files for positioning and formatting the content
• Site owner can also customize the CSS files especially the parts for formatting text to match their needs

Company and other organization like operating company within the company can take many advantages by using Web Standards. The development time for the intranet sites is much shorter because all organizations can take the main formatting code (CSS) and the mark-up code for the content structure (XHTML). They only need to customize it for their own needs since the templates built modularly. The maintenance cost can be lowered since there is more flexibility in case of redesign or small changes. A lighter site takes less bandwidth than a site with unnecessary formatting code or GIF spacer. Less bandwidth means lower server cost. A better branding experience because site owner can implement the web guidelines easily. XHTML as a part of Web Standards offers site owner a smother transformation to the future of mark up language XML and a multi devices content presentation.

Definitely there are some other aspects you need to consider for implementing the Web Standards solution within an intranet network. But on top of all kinds of Content Management System that you have, there is always a presentation level that formats and displays the contents to the user, so hey, why not go for the better approach?