The old WordPress intranet had gradually become somewhere people stopped visiting. Access was unreliable, much of the content was out of date, and it wasn’t always clear who was responsible for maintaining it. Giving it a new design wouldn’t, on its own, give anyone a reason to come back.
I proposed rebuilding it in SharePoint, which fitted the organisation’s existing Microsoft setup. More importantly, I wanted to use the project to find out what people actually needed from an internal site, rather than assume the old collection of pages was the right starting point.
Something people could react to
I brought together a cross-functional working group and built an early prototype before our next meeting. Having something to look at made the conversation much more practical: people could respond to a possible way of using the site instead of trying to imagine it from a description.
From there, I interviewed people across the business, worked through permissions and access levels, and coordinated with the IT provider. The content needed its own review too. There was little value in moving an unreliable archive into a cleaner shell, so we used the rebuild to revisit policies, establish ownership and decide what was worth carrying forward.
A reason to return
The new intranet brought together a live weekly schedule, a day-to-day knowledge board, social content, leadership updates and an anonymous feedback route. Those gave it a place in the working week beyond being somewhere to look for a document occasionally.
The schedule became the most-used page, with teams returning to it for an up-to-date view of the week. Social content also gained traction, and the site developed into a more active company space. Alongside that, the content work prompted a wider policy refresh rather than simply preserving what had been there before.
What made the difference
The technology gave us a more suitable home, but the useful shift was in what we put there and who looked after it. Starting with ordinary working needs made the rebuild easier to shape, and the early prototype helped people see where they could contribute.
It left us with an intranet people had practical reasons to use, rather than another place they were supposed to remember to check.