Designing an Engaging Intranet in SharePoint

An engaging SharePoint intranet comes down to three things: it looks like your organisation, the homepage changes often enough that people have a reason to come back, and the content in front of each person is relevant to them. You can get a long way with standard SharePoint, and when you need more than that, an intranet product such as Omnia or Involv sits on top of SharePoint and fills the gaps.

Building the site is one part of the job. Getting people to open it every morning, and keep opening it, is the harder part. These are the changes we make most often when a SharePoint intranet isn't getting the attention it should.

How do you brand a SharePoint intranet?

People can use SharePoint unbranded, it just looks like every other SharePoint site they have seen. When someone opens the intranet it should feel like part of your organisation, with your colours, your logo and your imagery, rather than a generic Microsoft page.

The out-of-the-box options are limited but they make more difference than you might expect. The quickest change is the site theme. Select the Settings gear, then Change the look, then Theme. SharePoint previews each theme on the page as you pick it, so you can see the result before you commit, and you either Save it or Cancel to go back to what you had. Microsoft's default themes are only a starting point, and a SharePoint administrator can add custom themes built around your brand colours and hide the defaults, which keeps every site looking consistent.

Beyond the theme, set a site logo, choose a header layout that suits the content, and use photos of your own people and places rather than stock imagery.

Should you replace the hero web part with a news feed?

The communication site templates put a Hero web part at the top of the homepage. It shows up to five tiles or layers of images and links, and it takes up most of the space above the fold. Used well it is useful, but on a lot of intranets it gets set up at launch and never touched again, so people see the same five pictures every day and stop looking at them.

We usually recommend giving that space to the News web part, or at least shrinking the hero so news sits near the top. News can be published by different people across the organisation, so it changes daily, and it can carry upcoming events, project updates, policy changes and wins. Audience targeting lets you show different stories to different groups using Microsoft 365 groups or Microsoft Entra ID security groups, so someone in finance doesn't have to scroll past news meant for a warehouse team at another site. Audience targeting filters what people see rather than securing it, so anything confidential still needs the right permissions.

Who should be allowed to publish intranet content?

If the only people who can post are the chief executive and the heads of department, the intranet turns into a noticeboard where people are talked at. Opening up publishing to more people, with some guidance on what good looks like, makes the content more varied and more likely to be read.

That doesn't mean everyone gets edit rights to the homepage. A setup that works well looks like this:

• department and team sites where those teams publish their own news
• a central news site that rolls up the stories worth showing to everyone
• a small group of communications owners who decide what gets boosted or featured
• a short guide covering tone, image sizes and when to use a news post rather than a page

Posts about team wins, new starters and finished projects do more for engagement than another message from the leadership team. If you want somewhere for the more informal conversation, Viva Engage communities can sit alongside the intranet and be shown on SharePoint pages with the Viva Engage web part.

How do you use a vertical section on a SharePoint page?

A vertical section runs down the right-hand side of a modern SharePoint page next to your other sections, which gives you a sidebar for content that doesn't belong in the main flow. On narrower screens it moves above or below the main content, and you can choose which.

Good uses for it include quick links to everyday systems, an events list, a Viva Engage feed or recent documents. Keep it short, because a sidebar with ten web parts stacked in it is just a second homepage that nobody scrolls to the bottom of.

When should you use an intranet product instead of SharePoint on its own?

Everything above can be done with standard SharePoint, and for plenty of organisations it is enough. It starts to struggle when you need richer page designs without custom development, content targeted by role, location and department across many sites, mega menu navigation, translation, a mobile app, or governance features such as approval workflows and mandatory reads.

We used to recommend Valo for this. Valo Intranet reached end of life on 31 July 2025 after Staffbase stopped developing it, so we no longer recommend it, and we have written about what Valo customers should do next. The products we recommend now are:

• Omnia, for a governed intranet with targeting by role, location and department, translation, approval workflows and analytics, typically implemented in 8 to 16 weeks
• Involv, a ready-to-use intranet with more than 50 prebuilt components, a mobile app and multilingual support, where most of the work is configuration and branding rather than development

Both run inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant, so your content and permissions stay where they are.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a SharePoint intranet cost?

Our pre-built SharePoint intranet costs £12,500 for up to 100 users and £17,500 for up to 500 users, with a quote for anything larger. Platform licensing for Involv or Omnia is charged per user on top of the project fee. A fully custom build costs more and takes months rather than weeks.

Can you brand SharePoint without custom code?

Yes. Site owners can change the theme, logo and header layout from Change the look, and a SharePoint administrator can publish custom themes in your brand colours using PowerShell. Anything beyond that, such as richer page designs or a branded mobile app, usually means an intranet product or SharePoint Framework development.

Is Valo still supported?

No. Valo Intranet reached end of life on 31 July 2025 when Staffbase stopped development. Existing Valo intranets should be planned for migration, and we move customers to Omnia, Involv or a standard SharePoint intranet depending on what they need.

How long does it take to build an engaging SharePoint intranet?

A pre-built intranet can be live in as little as 4 to 6 weeks. A typical Omnia implementation takes 8 to 16 weeks from kick-off to go-live, depending on size, languages and how much content is moving across.

If your intranet isn't being used the way you hoped, get in touch and we can talk through what would make the difference, or read more about our SharePoint intranets.