What Your Homepage Says About Your Intranet

16 March 2026

Ana Neves:

Every intranet’s homepage conveys a powerful message: what the intranet is there for.

Is it a communication channel? A place to find documents? A gateway to business applications? A space for colleagues to connect? Most intranets attempt some combination of these, but the homepage makes the priorities visible.

Better to be conscious and strategic about those choices.

A framework for seeing clearly

Intranet consultant Mads Richard developed a four-quadrant model that offers a useful lens for examining any intranet homepage. The model identifies four basic functions that intranet elements serve:

Library — helping people find information through navigation, shortcuts, and search. This is the intranet as a content repository, giving access to the past (reference material that preserves the history of the organisation), to the present (policies and procedures, for instance) and to the future (goals and strategy).

One-way communication — keeping people updated through news, messages, and announcements. This is the intranet as a broadcast channel, pushing information from the organisation to its people. It’s the corporate voice – be it from communications teams or leadership.

Tool — enabling people to get things done by updating data, making bookings, submitting approvals. This is the intranet as a workplace utility, linking to or integrating with business applications.

Two-way communication — facilitating interaction: sideways between peers, and vertically between different hierarchical levels. This is the intranet as a social space: connecting people, promoting dialogue, and enabling bottom-up sharing of knowledge, experiences and ideas.

When you look at a homepage through this lens, patterns emerge. The relative space given to each function tells a story about organisational priorities. Or what the intranet team believes those priorities to be.

What the data shows

The Intranet Hub, a safe space where organisations share screenshots of their intranets, applied Mads Richard’s model to homepage screenshots shared in 2025. Each homepage was analysed, with every page element categorised according to the four quadrants.

 A homepage imprint with page elements color-blocked according to their role. Click here to see all other homepage imprints.

The results were then averaged to create a picture of how homepage real estate is typically allocated.

The findings are striking. One-way communication dominates, occupying 56% of the average homepage. Library functions account for 17%, two-way communication another 17%, and tool functionality just 10%.

This means that, on average, more than half of what people see when they land on their intranet is news and updates. The intranet, as represented by its homepage, is primarily a broadcast medium.

Whether this reflects genuine organisational need or simply historical convention is worth questioning. News sections and lists of upcoming events are familiar. They have clear ownership. They are relatively easy to maintain. But does the prominence of one-way communication on most homepages reflect a deliberate strategy? Is it the path of least resistance? Or is it simply the easiest approach when the intranet – or at least its homepage – is frequently owned by corporate communications?

Your homepage is not a neutral space—it is a statement of intent, whether you meant to make one or not.

The questions worth asking

The value of this framework lies not in judging homepages as good or bad, but in prompting honest reflection. Consider your own intranet homepage:

• What percentage of the visible space serves each function? Does that allocation match what leadership expects the intranet should achieve? If senior executives describe the intranet as a tool for collaboration and knowledge sharing, but the homepage is 70% news, there is a gap between aspiration and reality.
• Does the homepage mirror and reinforce the corporate narrative? If leadership advocates for an open organisation and engaged workforce, are there elements on the homepage that truly encourage dialogue and participation?
• Who decided on the current layout, and when? Homepage designs tend to persist for a long time – through inertia, other priorities, or lack of ownership. This frequently leads to a homepage that reflects yesterday’s thinking rather than serving today’s needs and signalling tomorrow’s direction.
• What do employees actually need from the homepage? This question sounds obvious, but it is rarely asked systematically. Usage data can reveal whether the prominent news section is actually read, or whether people immediately navigate elsewhere to find what they came for.

If your intranet gives users the option to personalise the layout of their homepage:

• What do your default settings prioritise? What are the mandatory and fixed elements? How much flexibility are you giving employees?
• Are you tracking how people configure their homepages when given the choice? What does that data reveal about what employees actually value? Do different user groups show different patterns?

Finally, consider the mobile experience. Whether through a distinct mobile homepage or the way responsive design paces elements, you may be sending a very different message. Does it serve those who depend on it most—particularly frontline workers and colleagues on the move—while staying true to the intranet’s intended role?

Beyond the homepage

The homepage matters because it is visible, but it is not the whole story. An intranet can have a news-heavy homepage while still offering robust tools and collaboration spaces elsewhere. The question is whether the homepage accurately signals what is available, or whether it inadvertently hides the intranet’s most valuable capabilities and obscures the role it is meant to play.

Some organisations have moved away from the traditional homepage entirely, replacing it with personalised feeds, search-first designs, or integration into broader digital workplace platforms. These approaches represent a different answer to the same underlying question: what should people encounter first when they come to the intranet?

Having one homepage, common to all in the organisation, certainly helps ensure alignment, and a well-crafted homepage can serve as a valuable entry point. When mandating it isn’t possible or appropriate, shape the homepage so that people actually choose to use it.

There is no “right” homepage. An organisation in crisis communications mode may genuinely need a news-dominated homepage. A highly distributed workforce may benefit most from prominent collaboration tools. A company undergoing digital transformation may want to foreground self-service applications.

The point is not to prescribe, but to ensure the choice is intentional. Look at your homepage. Categorise what you see. Calculate the percentages if that helps. Then ask yourself: is this what we meant to say?

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Ana Neves is Partner at Knowman, host of the Intranet Hub, and organizer of Social Now.