πŸ—οΈ SharePoint Intranet Design & Development

You built an intranet.
Nobody uses it.

Beautiful launch day. Leadership sent the announcement email. Two months later, your SharePoint intranet is a ghost town. Employees still email documents. Nobody checks the news feed. The investment sits there, gathering digital dust, while your team stays disconnected. This isn't an employee problem. It's a design problem. And it's fixable.

Get a Free Intranet Audit β†’ See What's Included
800+
Employees onboarded to intranets I've built
11+
Years designing M365 portals
Day 1
Adoption built in, not bolted on

The six reasons your intranet became a digital graveyard.

Every dead intranet I've resurrected had at least three of these symptoms. They're not random failures. They're predictable outcomes of building for technology instead of building for people.

🏚️

It was designed by IT, not by users

The information architecture reflects how your IT department thinks about content, not how employees actually search for it. Departments have sites. But nobody asked whether departments are even how people organize their work. The result: a perfectly logical structure that nobody can navigate.

πŸ“°

The news feed is a corporate monologue

Leadership posts announcements. Nobody reads them. The news section feels like a one-way broadcast channel, not a communication tool. There's no relevance filtering, no personalization, no reason for someone in Engineering to scroll past a post about the Diwali party in the Pune office.

πŸ”

Search is completely useless

You type "travel policy" and get 300 results. Three different versions of the policy from three different years. Meeting notes that mention the word "travel." A PowerPoint from 2019. The one document you actually need? Page four, if you're lucky. Your team gave up on search months ago.

πŸ“±

It doesn't work on mobile

Half your workforce is on the floor, in the field, or between meetings. They access everything from their phone. Your intranet was built for desktop browsers. On mobile, it's a mess of tiny text, broken layouts, and horizontal scrolling. So they open WhatsApp instead.

πŸ•ΈοΈ

Content is stale and nobody owns it

The HR policy page still references the old leave system. The IT support section has a phone number that was disconnected two years ago. Nobody knows who's responsible for updating what. Content owners were never designated. Now the intranet feels unreliable, so people don't trust it.

🎨

It looks like a SharePoint default template

No branding. No visual identity. The intranet looks like every other uncustomized SharePoint site. It doesn't feel like your company's space. Employees feel no ownership over it. Compare that to the tools they actually use daily. Slack looks great. Your CRM looks professional. Your intranet looks abandoned.

Recognized three or more of these?

Your intranet isn't failing because of SharePoint. It's failing because of how it was built. That's exactly what I fix.

Talk to Darshana β†’
The Transformation

What changes when an intranet is built by someone who's done it 50 times.

This isn't a redesign. It's a rethinking. Every decision, from the homepage layout to the metadata behind every document, is made to answer one question: will employees actually use this tomorrow morning?

❌ What you have now
  • βœ• Employees email files because they can't find the library
  • βœ• News page hasn't been updated in three months
  • βœ• Search returns everything except what you need
  • βœ• New hires have no idea where to find onboarding docs
  • βœ• IT gets 10+ "where is this document" requests per week
  • βœ• Leadership has no visibility into engagement metrics
  • βœ• Mobile access is essentially broken
  • βœ• No governance model for content ownership
βœ… What I build for you
  • βœ“ Document centers with intelligent metadata and one-click access
  • βœ“ Targeted news that shows employees what's relevant to them
  • βœ“ Search that surfaces the right answer in under 3 seconds
  • βœ“ Onboarding hub that guides new hires through week one
  • βœ“ Self-service structure so IT isn't a bottleneck for basic requests
  • βœ“ Analytics dashboard tracking engagement across departments
  • βœ“ Mobile-first responsive design that works on every device
  • βœ“ Content ownership matrix with automated review reminders

The complete intranet. Not just a homepage.

Most agencies hand you a pretty homepage and call it an intranet. That's a poster, not a platform. A real intranet is an ecosystem of interconnected components, each designed for a specific function and a specific audience.

🏠

Company Homepage

The central hub. News, quick links, targeted announcements, leadership messages, and a search bar that actually works. Designed to be the first tab every employee opens.

  • βœ“ Role-based content targeting
  • βœ“ Dynamic news feed with scheduling
  • βœ“ Quick links based on job function
  • βœ“ Engagement analytics built in
🏒

Department Hub Sites

Each department gets its own structured space. HR, Finance, IT, Operations, Sales. Connected to the main hub but tailored to departmental needs, workflows, and content types.

  • βœ“ Department-specific navigation
  • βœ“ Document libraries with managed metadata
  • βœ“ Team calendar and events integration
  • βœ“ Department news and announcements
πŸ“„

Document Management Center

Policies, SOPs, templates, forms. All organized with consistent metadata, version control, and retention policies. Users find what they need without asking IT or emailing colleagues.

  • βœ“ Metadata-driven navigation
  • βœ“ Automatic version control
  • βœ“ Content approval workflows
  • βœ“ Retention labels and compliance tagging
🧭

Employee Onboarding Portal

New hires open a structured, step-by-step portal on day one. IT setup instructions, HR forms, team introductions, company culture docs, training links. Everything in one place instead of a 14-email chain.

  • βœ“ Checklist-driven onboarding flow
  • βœ“ Department-specific onboarding paths
  • βœ“ Integration with HR systems
  • βœ“ Progress tracking for managers
πŸ”Ž

Enterprise Search Configuration

The invisible engine that makes or breaks an intranet. I configure search with promoted results, custom verticals, acronym definitions, and result types so employees find the right content on the first try.

  • βœ“ Bookmarks for high-frequency queries
  • βœ“ Q&A cards for common questions
  • βœ“ Custom search verticals by content type
  • βœ“ Acronym management for your org
πŸ“Š

Analytics and Engagement Tracking

You can't improve what you can't measure. I set up dashboards that show which pages get traffic, which get ignored, where users drop off, and what they search for but can't find.

  • βœ“ Page view and unique visitor tracking
  • βœ“ Search query analytics (hits + misses)
  • βœ“ Content freshness monitoring
  • βœ“ Monthly insights report template
Proof, Not Promises

Results from real intranet projects.

πŸ“ˆ
85%
daily active usage
within 60 days of launch
⏱️
70%
reduction in "where is this?"
IT support requests
πŸ”
3 sec
average time to find
a document via search
πŸ‘₯
800+
employees successfully
onboarded to new intranets
β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…

"Darshana rebuilt our SharePoint intranet from a page nobody visited into the first thing our 800+ employees open every morning. She understood our business before touching a single configuration. The governance framework she left behind means we can evolve it ourselves."

AM
Amit M.
CTO, Financial Services

From dead intranet to daily-use platform in 8 weeks.

Every intranet project follows a structured path. No guesswork. No "let's figure it out as we go." You know what's happening, why, and when.

01

User Research and Stakeholder Interviews

I talk to the people who will actually use this every day. Not just IT. Not just leadership. The operations manager who needs the SOP. The new hire who can't find the insurance form. The field engineer checking something on their phone. Their input shapes every design decision.

This is the step most agencies skip entirely. It's the reason their intranets look great on launch day and become ghost towns by month two.
02

Information Architecture Design

The blueprint for how content is organized, labeled, and connected. This determines whether someone can find the travel policy in two clicks or gives up after five. I design navigation structures, hub-site hierarchies, metadata schemas, and content type definitions based on how your people actually think about information.

03

Visual Design and Branding

Your intranet should feel like your company. Brand colors, typography, custom headers, team photography instead of stock images. When employees open the intranet, it should feel familiar and owned, not like a generic Microsoft template with your logo pasted in the corner.

04

Build, Configure, Integrate

Pages built in Modern SharePoint with SPFx customizations where needed. Hub sites configured. Department sites connected. Search tuned. Navigation finalized. Power Automate workflows set up for content approval and publishing. Teams integration for notifications. Everything wired together.

05

Pilot Launch with Champion Group

Before company-wide rollout, a group of 20 to 30 "intranet champions" across departments test everything. They find the edge cases, the confusing labels, the missing links. Their feedback shapes the final refinements. When you launch company-wide, it's already been validated by real users.

Champions become your internal advocates. They answer questions, model usage, and create peer pressure for adoption. This is adoption strategy, not just testing.
06

Company-Wide Launch and Training

Coordinated rollout with leadership communication, short video walkthroughs, and live training sessions for content owners. Every department knows what's changed, where to find things, and who to contact. The intranet launches not as a surprise, but as something people are already expecting and curious about.

07

Governance Handoff and 90-Day Support

Complete governance documentation. Content ownership matrix. Editorial calendar template. Training materials for future content owners. Your team takes full ownership of the intranet with confidence. Optional 90-day support retainer covers questions, optimizations, and any tweaks needed as usage patterns emerge.

Questions You're Thinking

Answered before you need to ask.

A focused intranet build, from discovery through launch, typically runs 6 to 10 weeks. Larger organizations with multiple department hubs, complex governance needs, and integration requirements may extend to 12 to 16 weeks. The timeline is clear and predictable because the process is structured, not ad-hoc.
Yes. Many engagements are redesigns of existing SharePoint intranets that underperformed. I audit what exists, identify what's worth keeping, and restructure the information architecture and visual design around actual user needs. Sometimes a redesign is faster and more cost-effective than a ground-up build, because the content already exists.
Adoption is not a post-launch activity. It's baked into every step of the process. User research ensures the intranet solves real problems. The champion pilot creates internal advocates. The launch is coordinated with leadership messaging. Training is role-specific, not generic. And governance ensures content stays fresh, which is the number one reason people stop visiting an intranet.
Intranet projects range from $15,000 for a focused redesign to $40,000+ for a comprehensive enterprise build with multiple hub sites, custom SPFx components, and governance frameworks. Every engagement begins with a discovery phase that produces a detailed scope and fixed-price proposal. No surprises.
Yes. If your organization uses Microsoft Teams as the primary work surface, I can set up Viva Connections so the intranet experience lives directly inside Teams. This means employees don't need to open a separate browser tab. The intranet meets them where they already spend their day.
That's the entire point. Every intranet I build comes with a governance playbook, content owner training, editorial calendar template, and hands-on knowledge transfer sessions. Your team owns the platform going forward. If you want ongoing advisory support, retainer options are available, but they're entirely optional and never a dependency.

Every week your intranet sits unused, it costs you.

Employees wasting 20 minutes a day looking for documents. That's 1.5 hours per person, per week. Multiply by your headcount. That's the cost of an intranet that doesn't work. A 30-minute conversation with me could be the start of fixing that permanently.

⚑ Currently accepting 2 new intranet projects per quarter. Availability fills quickly.