So, you’re tasked with creating a SharePoint site for your department or an intranet? Where do you start?
You’re in the right place.
First, I’ll cover some basics, but feel free to skip those right to the part that talks about “Steps to Create a SharePoint Site”.
To get a good grasp of what you can and can’t do in SharePoint, let’s start with “What’s SharePoint in the first place?”
What is SharePoint?
You can think of SharePoint as a website builder for internal company pages. But it’s a bit more than that.
SharePoint is an entire platform with advanced security and the ability to store and manage documents. Companies also use SharePoint to securely share resources, news, and events with their employees in a single place.
This is an example of a modern SharePoint site that is used as a foundation for Microsoft 365 intranet.
The truth is that plenty of platforms can help companies build their internal sites – so why does nearly everyone use SharePoint? Let’s look at that next.
Why Use SharePoint?
Most companies use SharePoint because it’s part of Microsoft 365—a powerful platform that gives companies email, video conferencing, office applications, and more. Recently, Microsoft 365 introduced Microsoft AI Copilot—an AI tool for business, making Microsoft 365 even more promising for the future!
SharePoint being part of the M365 bundle is a top choice for company intranet and is trusted by 200,000 organizations around the world for creating internal websites, facilitating team collaboration, and securely hosting data.
So now that you know what is SharePoint and why everyone uses it, what is then a SharePoint site? Let’s look at that next.
What is a SharePoint site?
SharePoint site is a feature that lets you build pages and bundle them almost like an internal website. This site will have its own URL and you can choose who can access it.
To help you see what you can and can’t do on a SharePoint site, we've put together a video that shows this in action. This video gives an overview of the key SharePoint web parts and some of their limitations.
Top SharePoint web parts in action
Now that you know what a SharePoint site is, feel free to skip right to the part which explains how to create it.
If you’re curious, we have one more section that lists other SharePoint features in addition to the SharePoint site.
Key SharePoint Features: Pros and Cons
Say you work at a medium-sized organization, what would be some of the top features you’ll find useful? Here we go:
Document Management and Sharing: SharePoint provides document libraries for storing and sharing company-wide documents.
Employees can upload, organize, and share documents securely.
Version control makes it easy to track past versions of documents, and permissions can be set to control who can view, edit, or delete documents.
Everyone can work together on documents in real time, regardless of their location.
Bring the Team Together: You can create dedicated sites within SharePoint for various departments, projects, or teams. These spaces enable employees to collaborate on projects and share ideas.
Scalability: As a company grows, SharePoint scales effortlessly.
Employees can add new team sites or document libraries.
Everything is managed on a backend automatically to make sure that SharePoint has enough storage and is backed up.
If your team is spread across multiple locations, SharePoint makes it so the site is instantly accessible and runs fast whether someone is at the office or across the ocean!
Customization: SharePoint lets you change the page or a site to your specific department needs. You can add different web parts and workflows without coding. Also, you can purchase add-ons and plug them right into your SharePoint instantly making it even more functional. That’s how third-party products like Origami are bolted onto SharePoint to enhance its design.
Integration with Microsoft 365: SharePoint seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft 365 tools.
When you upload a document into Teams or record a meeting with Teams, the file is automatically saved to SharePoint without you needing to do anything.
Permissions and access are managed automatically.
When you open a document in SharePoint, it’ll recognize which Office app should be used for that (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents) and you can edit the document in real-time right there.
Advanced Security: When you upload or host something in the cloud, it’s natural to worry about security. SharePoint offers some of the most advanced security features.
You can enable multifactor authentication, so employees are required to approve their login with SMS or an authenticator app.
You can set up password policies to require more secure passwords.
You can set role-based access so that even when employees log in, they only see things they have access to and more sensitive documents are out of reach. This setting can be enabled on specific documents or sites to protect sensitive information.
What are some of the SharePoint limitations?
SharePoint can be Complex: While basic functions are user-friendly, advanced configuration may need some learning. Luckily, there are plenty of SharePoint consultants who specialize in SharePoint, and it may be a good idea to bring one in as needed—you don’t have to be a pro in everything!
Clutter: With all these options to create sites and documents, SharePoint can become a runaway train—cluttered and difficult to navigate. We recommend bringing a SharePoint consultant to help set things up.
Cost: Initial setup, especially if you use consultants can feel costly, especially for smaller and mid-sized organizations. Think of it as an investment, because a proper and secure setup will help reduce liability costs (future breaches, audit costs, increased insurance premiums—cyber insurance for example, ad-hoc fixes that pile up in the long term)
Frequent Updates: Microsoft updates SharePoint very frequently, and it may be disruptive to some users. It’s important to set the right expectations for your employees that updates are part of life and don’t get frustrated if they happen. The most important is that none of these updates so far have ever resulted in the loss of data.
Time to Learn: Because SharePoint is such a big product and may be new to some employees, it’s important to do initial user training.
Now that you have all the background information, let’s go ahead and see how we can create that SharePoint site!
6 Steps to Create a SharePoint Site
Step 1: Decide What Kind of SharePoint Site You Need
There are two types of sites on SharePoint:
Communication Site: This type of site is designed to share information with the entire company. For example, you can use this site for the SharePoint homepage, onboarding page, leader resource center, and learning and development pages. You can share news, events, key performance indicators (KPIs), forms, and other resources that lots of people will access. Everyone on a Communication site has read-only access and you can set special permissions for a handful of people who are authors and moderators.
Team Site: This type of site is restricted to a certain group of individuals, more private, and is often used as a workspace for specific teams or projects. The information and files on these sites are generally restricted. These are often used for internal department team sites, project sites, and corporate records sites. Everyone on a Team site can edit documents on that site (but you can set exceptions).
As you can see, these two types of SharePoint sites are made for different needs – Communication sites for broad, company-wide information sharing, and Team sites for focused group work.
Step 2: Create a SharePoint Site using Microsoft Templates
Now that you have a better idea of what kind of SharePoint site you need, you can select a Microsoft starter template for your site.
Let’s start with creating a SharePoint Communication site which is captured in this video.
And, if you need a SharePoint Team site, here is how you’d create one:
Step 3: Link your SharePoint Site to the rest of SharePoint
Now that you’ve created your SharePoint site with its own URL, we need to link it to the rest of the intranet, otherwise, employees won’t be able to easily find it.
So where do you link it?
If you’ve created a private Team site for a Department, then you’d want to create some overarching top label for all of your department sites so only members of these departments can see a link to their department's own site. Here is an example of how a top label called “Departments” groups all links to various department sites.
Visually, in your top navigation you can name the label something like “Workspaces and Teams” similar to below:
For communication sites, things might be even easier because communication site can be simply a link under “Employee Center” or “Business Resources” as shown below:
Simple! No more hunting for pages, simplified permissions, and a cleaner look.
Step 4: Add Pages to Your SharePoint Site
Sometimes all you need for your site is a single page, if that’s the case, skip to step 5 next.
In other cases, your site might need more than one page. For example, for an intranet you might need pages like “onboarding” or “benefits” etc. So, how do you add pages to your SharePoint Site? The easiest way to do that is to copy our homepage by following these simple steps:
1. Click the Gear Icon on the top right corner of the homepage
2. Go to “Site Contents”
3. Click “Site Pages”
4. Click the three dots next to the page you want to copy and select “Copy to”
5. Click “Copy here”, if you want to copy it to the existing folder
6. Click “Keep both”, reload the page and you will see a page with similar configurations as the homepage appearing in the folder.
7. Click three dots next to the copied page and select “Rename” to change the name of this page as it appears in the URL
Next, you can click on the new page we’ve just created and go to the edit mode to add news, resources, or events you want to share on this page. This is when you might want to customize the look and feel and make it look in line with company branding.
Copy a SharePoint Page to Another Site
Now what if you made this really great-looking page and want to use it on other sites?
Out of the box SharePoint is a bit limited and won’t let you copy pages across sites, but if you’re using ORIGAMI, you can copy pages anywhere in your tenant by using Copy Page Tool:
Simply provide the URL of the target page you want to copy and the URL of the site where you’d like to copy the page and that’s it, within minutes you can make a copy of the page with all of its web parts to another site.
Step 5: Customize Your SharePoint Page
If you want your SharePoint site to be adopted, it better look attractive and be easy to navigate.
Here is a video of how you can make your site look like a modern website.
Bonus Step 6: Make Your SharePoint Look Like a Website
You can try customizing your SharePoint with the web parts available out-of-the-box but it comes with some limits, and it takes time to set up intranet pages one by one.
Now, what if, instead, you could get a website-like starter intranet that already comes with the most popular SharePoint pages, design-enhancing apps, and best practices other companies follow? That would save a lot of time! You wouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel and can use beautiful page templates as starters.
This can help you take your intranet live way faster because you won’t have to spend months waiting for the development to finish! You can start making changes today, you don’t have to ask anyone to code anything for you because you have all the tools to do it yourself!
Watch this video to see how you can get this SharePoint starter with Origami.
Use examples from this PDF to inspire you for your next SharePoint project!
Sabina Saetgareeva is a Digital Marketing Specialist at ORIGAMI. She helps infuse ORIGAMI brand with what customers need and seek. Sabina is an avid reader of the future of work, digital transformation, and trends in Digital Employee Experience.