Need help - Quick intranet "style" question

[Christine Fedruk <CFED44 -at- CBOT -dot- COM>]

Hi everyone,
Looking for real-world advice, here... We discussed this topic
on-list last fall, but those archived posts don't have the info
I'm looking for now. Would appreciate your help!

Here's my situation: I'm at the helm of our "intranet
initiative" and my primary goal is to set up a page template and
style sheet for the technical documentation that's changing
from paper to web-based format. (I'm in an in-house systems
development group, and most of our docs are used by internal
production system support groups.) We're pretty new at the
whole intranet thing but are zippily moving ahead, templates or
no.

We've nailed down the site structure and content pretty well
-- my stumbling point right now is style and page layout. It's
my belief that colored text, script fonts, and colored /
textured backgrounds have no place on our technical
documenation intranet sites. The other writers seem to really
enjoy using them, though... and they point out lovely Intranet
sites to back themselves up. I'm not arguing against creativity,
but this is an internal company intranet, and our typical reader
is a time-pressed technician who just wants to find the latest
release notes and figure out what went wrong. Hmm.

So here's the question:
If you use an intranet at your company, is technical
information available on it? And if so, does it look fairly
vanilla, or do your writers/designers use "creative" fonts and
formatting? (If you're willing/able to share any style sheets
you've developed, that would be a big bonus. :->)

I'm a newsgroup reader these days, so a direct reply would be
great. I will summarize to list if there's interest.
Thanks much,
Christine
Chicago, IL