Re: Need help - Quick intranet "style" question

[Marilynne Smith <marilyns -at- QUALCOMM -dot- COM>]

Look at the Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM web sites.  They're pretty
conservative.  QUALCOMM too has a pretty conservative intranet page
(in-company site) where departments do their own thing within certain
guidelines.  Look at the web sites of companies who are in the same or
similar business.

The internet site (a public site) is more glitzy, but still fairly
conservative.  I am convinced that this is the trend.  Unless you are
actually selling something from your site, stay conservative.

You can see the QUALCOMM web site at http://www.qualnet.com

Marilynne
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At 3:55 PM -0500 4/22/98, Christine Fedruk wrote:
>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
>


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  Marilynne Smith               Sr. Technical Writer
  QUALCOMM              marilyns -at- qualcomm -dot- com
                  "We'll have the whole world talking"