Planning A Successful SharePoint Site

A majority of my SharePoint posts up until this point have been very focused on the “engineering” of a SharePoint infrastructure. While this is obviously very important I thought I would jump forward about 30 steps and talk about building a successful SharePoint site. (This post does assume that when you are ready to start you do have a functioning SharePoint environment running.)

Know Your Audience

Knowing who is going to be coming to your site is important to understand in advance for several reasons. The first is for planning your security profile and user governance for the site. Many organization use Role Based Access Groups (RBAC) to control access to the site (either Active Directory Groups or Exchange Distribution Lists). These need to be provisioned and people need to be added to them. Knowing your audience also includes knowing what the roles of your users. Clearly identifying who can do what on the site in advance is incredibly important.

Less Is More

This has to do w/ the front page design. I know your site’s data is incredibly important to your audience and you don’t want to create needless clicking – but use that front page for only the most pertinent information and use the remaining space for navigators to the rest of it. To this point, not everyone who visits your site is interest in all of the data it contains. One other tactic here is make your site a search driven portal. I have a future post on this coming up – but it is a great way to create the ultimate dynamic site.

Get Graphical

OK, this one could have been a “part b” to the previous point, but SharePoint sites can get sooooo text ridden. Make those navigators some nifty web 2.0ish icons. There are many libraries available online for free.

Think of your Content as Produce

Produce you ask? Yes – Produce. What does all produce have in common? If it isn’t fresh, you won’t buy it. (OK.. don’t bring up dried fruits and veggies… work with me here!) You will only have visitors as long as the data on the page matters to them – and it will only matter as long as it is current. Please don’t go to all of the effort you are about to go through and not put in place a plan, strategy, or authors in place to keep the data fresh and up-to-date.

Tags: Planning, SharePoint