SharePoint - Five Steps to a Better SharePoint Experience

Helping visitors to get the most out of your site needn't be hard work. Here are five starter tips to make your SharePoint site better to use.

1. Make the Site's Purpose Clear: Start the home page with a sentence or two that describes the purpose of the site. It's important that first time visitors to your site know quickly whether they are in the right place to accomplish the task they are trying to do.

2. Help Users Get Their Jobs Done: What are the main tasks a user coming to your site will want to perform? Think in a task-oriented way and provide a simple way for people to perform these activities. In prototypes I often use big prominent buttons to highlight the main tasks. PowerPoint is a great tool for making professional looking buttons in seconds.

3. Make it Easy to Access Relevant Content: Provide simple navigation to content in the site and other locations. Is there information that users always need at-a-glance access to? If so put it right there on the home page. For example on a site managing committee documents and meetings you might want to see a link to the most recent set of minutes. On a purchase request site list the user's outstanding orders and current status. SharePoint views make this easy.

4. Less Is More: People scan a page looking for key words and phrases to enable them to quickly find what they want. Putting too much clutter on a page makes it hard for them to do that. It's tempting to fill up a site's home page with web parts showing every bit of information in the site. But don't be afraid of white space. Keep the home page clean and uncluttered. Focus on simple navigation and only the most vital information.

5. Make Appropriate Use of Graphics: Images are powerful communicators when used judiciously - helping illustrate content and guide users to items of interest. Office ships with a set of clip art that is a great starting point. But be careful, don't over use graphics and always make sure the your images are relevant if you want this to succeed.

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Errett CordAuthor Info: Errett Cord is a former excutive of a web hosting firm who has worked with many small- to medium-sized companies developing effective internet strategies. As part of his commitment to helping others improve their businesses, Errett has become deeply involved with Magento, WordPress, SharePoint and how to effectively set up and manage the platform. Contact Errett Cord (ecord@ecord.us)