Ways of making life easier

This week Csaba is continuing his weekly diary of life as an internal communicator in Hungary and sharing his experience via my blog. Here he looks back on the past week and reveals what kept him busy this week and how he has been discovering ways of making life easier through measurement.

In the beginning of the week I started to work on the restructuring of the homepage of our intranet. The first steps covered only deleting or removing certain links, which were there for ages so to speak. The issue was that several images were used as links and because of that the homepage was quite crowded. So I removed those images and created the links in an appropriate way. In some cases I used images, however I created new and smaller ones. After that I reorganised the portlets on the homepage so that the user can avoid scrolling in the future. By the way I intend to recreate the homepage according to those seven roles, which I read about earlier on the website of Step Two Designs.

During the week I dealt with several smaller tasks covering updating content, changing forms, reorganising links and so on. These tasks are not so interesting but at least you can see the result of your work immediately so to speak. In the meantime I wrote down every idea, which came to my mind during the routine work. For example, I noted that we should use an RSS portlet to show the recent press releases to the internal audience, too. Unfortunately, our press releases do not have an RSS feed yet so I sent an email to the responsible ones to ask them to manage that if it is possible.

I must mention the following one. My superior asked me to create a survey – using our online survey tool -, which will be our virtual opinion box in the future. Feedback of the colleagues is important an we need a tool, which can be used easily. I prepared it but I have to do some minor tasks regarding that during the next week. For example, placing a link on the homepage and so on.

As I suppose some of you using a newsletter to inform colleagues about the latest news regarding the company. We also do so via an online weekly one. Although, we use it only to direct colleagues to the intranet. So the newsletter, which we send out via email contains only titles and short sentences. Titles are direct links to the real content. I suggested that we should use bit.ly so that we can measure, which one is interesting for the colleagues. It works great. I must mention that my idea came after I read the post of Wedge about Using URL shorteners for your intranet. Although, he covered a slightly different topic in his post but I recognised that we also could measure the efficiently of our newsletter thanks to that one.

Post author: Csaba Szucs