Intranet builder: prototype the home page and news, and keep staff-only content private
Most intranets fail quietly: nobody updates them, so nobody opens them. The design questions that decide whether yours gets used, what goes on the home page, how news is shown, where the forms people need live, are cheap to answer with a prototype. Anticode can build one from sample content. It can't host the real thing, because every page it publishes is public, and an intranet by definition isn't.
The jobs an intranet does
Ask staff what they'd use and the answers cluster into a few jobs. Design the home page around the top three for your organisation, not around the org chart.
- Find a document: the holiday policy, the expenses form, the brand logo, the fire procedure.
- Know what's happening: company news, office closures, a new client, someone's leaving drinks.
- Do a task: book leave, report an IT problem, order business cards, claim expenses. Usually a link to the system that actually does it.
- Find a person: a directory, covered on its own in the employee directory app page.
- Start well: a new-starter section with the first week's essentials.
A home page people come back to
Good intranet home pages are boring in the right way. A search box at the top that covers documents and pages. Three or four news items with dates, so stale news is obvious. A short row of the tasks people do most, as large links. Anything urgent, such as a building closure, in a banner that disappears when it's over. Avoid a wall of department tiles: they mirror how the company is organised, not what people are looking for.
News deserves thought of its own. Decide who may post, how long items stay on the home page, and whether there are categories (company, office, social). An intranet with one enthusiastic author and no expiry dates looks abandoned within months.
Building the prototype
Describe the layout and the content types: "An intranet prototype for a 60-person housing association. Home page with search, the three newest news items, a closure banner, and quick links: book leave, report a repair to IT, expenses, the policy library. A news page with categories and dates. A policy library with categories and a search. A new starters page. All content is sample, labelled demo data."
To let a colleague edit news and policies without asking for a rebuild, ask for them as CMS collections. You or a teammate edit entries in the Anticode dashboard and the app shows them. That's a good way to test whether people will really keep news fresh. The content is read-only in the app itself, and the people editing it need access to your Anticode workspace.
Why staff-only content can't go on the published app
Anticode has no password-protected or private published pages. A published site or app is public at its address, and an unguessable name isn't protection: links get forwarded, pasted into tickets and picked up by browser history. Internal policies, salary bands, client names, phone numbers and incident procedures all need a sign-in in front of them. The app also has no network, so it couldn't check a sign-in against anything even if it showed a form.
The prototype itself is safe to publish while it holds invented content, and that's a reasonable way to share it with a working group for comment. Client review links, which expire and can be revoked, are another way to show it before publishing anything.
Where the real intranet should live
- Your existing workspace suite. If the company already uses a collaboration suite with sign-in, its intranet or wiki features are usually the quickest secure option, and they already know who your staff are.
- A wiki or knowledge-base tool with company sign-in, for organisations whose intranet is mainly documents.
- A custom build from the Next.js export, when you need something specific: it gives a developer Postgres through Prisma, sign-in, roles, an admin area with two-factor sign-in and an audit log. Pages for news and documents would be built on top of that.
Whatever you choose, carry over what the prototype taught you: the quick links people actually used, the news categories that stuck and the search terms that failed. For a company's public face, see the corporate website design guide.
Questions people ask
Can I use Anticode as an intranet builder for real staff content?
No. Published pages and apps are public, with no sign-in in front of them. Use it to prototype the layout with sample content.
Can colleagues post news to the prototype?
Yes, through CMS collections edited in the dashboard, if they have access to your workspace. Keep the content non-sensitive.
Is a hidden link private enough for an intranet?
No. Links get forwarded and saved. Anything internal needs a sign-in.