Custom Intranet Design: The Pros and Cons

Your intranet is pretty important to your business, but its design and build doesn't come without its problems. An average intranet takes around 15 months to implement and can easily generate a five figure sum worth of costs. Not exactly ideal when you've gone with the wrong type of intranet for your business. Custom intranet design can be specially tailored to your business and help you get the most - there are still the pros and cons to go through though.

The cons (let's get these out of the way)

Time

It's not exactly a quick process, so you've got to be committed and patient.

Ongoing support

If you haven't gone with an off-the-shelf solution, then I'm afraid your intranet won't automatically come with support - it might be necessary to outsource this.

Ongoing costs

New rollouts to fixing bugs, there might be additional costs to your custom intranet.

Evolution

Everytime you want to add new features, it will require an investment of time and resources to make that happen, as (after all) it is bespoke.

The pros (little bit more positive)

Bespoke design

Your unique intranet is completely customisable and perfectly tailored to you - surely that's a big plus?

Navigation control

With a pre-created product, navigation can be a quite sticky and a little bit lacking. Not a problem with custom intranet design.

No wastage

A bespoke design is lean and effective, with all the features that you do want to have and none of the features that you don't. Why have them when you won't use them?

Broad integration options

With a pre-bought intranet, there may be a limited number of option when it comes to integration, but with a custom design it's more likely that this will be easy to achieve.

The key questions

Whatever you do, you've got to ask yourself: