Every intranet needs a set of essential pages.
It's not enough to have a few images and links on your SharePoint homepage, as you can see in the basic examples of the SharePoint lookbook.
Most employees say they have a hard time finding things this way.
In this post, I'll show you SharePoint templates for the essential SharePoint intranet pages and how you can make them look beautiful and website-like.
What are the types of SharePoint sites?
There are two types of SharePoint sites:
Communication site – helps you share news & events, view KPIs, find forms, build employee engagement, and share other company-wide resources. The image below is an example of a great-looking communication site.
Communication sites are usually open to the whole company, and some examples include:
SharePoint start page/homepage
HR department or employee services page
Learning and development page
SharePoint Template for a Communication Site Landing Page
Collaboration site – helps teams and project members collaborate on the project or within a department. Information and files on the Collaboration site are usually locked down to a particular group of individuals.
Examples of this type of site are:
Internal department team site (ex.: site to keep HR personnel files or legal documents)
Project site
Corporate records site
What makes a great SharePoint site?
Here is what’s important for each type of SharePoint site:
Communication site
Serves information to all employees in order of importance
Personalizes some content to groups of employees (based on location or another attribute)
It's clean and easy to read
Easy to navigate and understand the content
Fresh and up to date
Collaboration site
Keeps information members of this team or department need daily right at the front
Has easy to understand security so that private documents are well locked
Lists who the team members are with the ability to contact a team member
Connected to the rest of the intranet via intuitive navigation
Let's look at examples of some of the best SharePoint online site templates that follow these principles.
SharePoint Templates
1. SharePoint start page/homepage template
The SharePoint start page or homepage is usually the first page employees see when they land on a company intranet.
The homepage is the most important page because it can get 10 to 20 times more views than any other page on the intranet. It would be a waste to have a homepage that is not useful.
When designed well, as shown in the example below, the SharePoint start page template can be a valuable resource in itself and not just a launchpad to go elsewhere.
What the above SharePoint page template does well?
- News tagging makes it easy to find articles based on categories
- Quick links are organized in a sleek clutter-free layout
- Personalized welcome banner makes the page relevant to more users
- Clean and easy-to-read company scorecard
- Quick access to relevant documents
2. SharePoint onboarding site template
3. SharePoint Payroll & Benefits Site Template
4. modern & cLEAN SharePoint site template
5. SharePoint department site template
SharePoint department site is a landing page where employees can go for department-specific information, such as the HR department. It usually contains department news, resources, and a people directory.
Not to be confused with the internal department site for inter-departmental collaboration, as discussed further.
SharePoint department site template built with Origami tools
What this SharePoint site template does well?
- Clean and easy-to-read
- Engaging and on-brand modern design
- Quick access to relevant KPIs and documents
- Easy to find department news and updates
- Easy to find department team members and their contact information
6. SharePoint template for project management
A project site is a central place to store all project-related files, track progress and share performance updates with the team.
SharePoint project management template has everything a project team needs daily. It's a single source of truth for documents, tasks, and reports. Keeping project-related resources on a project team site saves time for everyone. You can use the SharePoint project site and the MS Teams channel to simplify storing project documents. The project site would be open only to people who are part of the project.
What the SharePoint page template does well?
- Clearly visible calendar, meetings, and planner sections make important dates hard to miss
- The performance dashboard helps track important project KPIs. This help to keep your team focused on the goals
- The to-do planner uses visual task list and progress buckets to keep the project on track and project members accountable
- The intuitive timeline shows the deadlines and accomplished milestones
- All project documents are in one place for easy access
- Quick links give fast access to essential information from the project (ex.: costs, risks, and objectives)
- Navigation to quickly access the rest of the intranet
7. SharePoint internal department site template
An internal department team site helps employees collaborate on documents, find resources specific to their team, and keep track of their tasks, calendar, and important team announcements. A SharePoint team site is a secure place only open to employees within that team.
Examples of internal department sites can be the HR department site, Legal team site, Finance team site, etc.
What the SharePoint site template does well?
- Prominent headings highlight time-sensitive sections of the site
- Personalized tasks, meetings and quick links at the top make the site more relevant to team members and improve SharePoint adoption
- Quick links help access team resources easily: projects, docs, directory, and reports
- A high-level overview of all team projects and their progress status helps keep everyone in the team organized
- Employees are up to date with the recent changes made by their team members for a better collaboration
- Navigation to easily get back to other parts of the intranet
Putting it all together
A solid plan is essential if you're building a new or migrating an existing SharePoint intranet.
Intranet projects can launch 6-10 times faster by following an intranet launch plan. Check out our SharePoint Project Plan below to see what goes into a successful SharePoint intranet project!
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Digital Workplace Advisor at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.