A Better Way to Do SharePoint Intranet Design in 2025

There’s something honest about wood. You cut into it, and it tells you a story—its grain, its imperfections, the way it bends but never breaks. I learned that from my grandfather, Ken Kaiser, a man who carved entire worlds with a chainsaw. He could look at a gnarled piece of timber and see the bear inside, waiting to be set free.

There’s something honest about wood. You cut into it, and it tells you a story—its grain, its imperfections, the way it bends but never breaks. I learned that from my grandfather, Ken Kaiser, a man who carved entire worlds with a chainsaw. He could look at a gnarled piece of timber and see the bear inside, waiting to be set free.

That’s the thing about great design—whether it’s a log turned into a sculpture or a digital workspace built on SharePoint—it’s never about force-fitting something into a mold. It’s about revealing what was always there, waiting to be discovered.

Why Most SharePoint Intranets Suck (And How We Got Here)

The corporate intranet. A place where enthusiasm goes to die, buried under a pile of broken links, outdated documents, and desperate pleas for IT support. You’ve seen it before—endless folders stacked inside folders, a homepage that hasn’t changed since 2015, and a search function so bad that people just email each other for documents instead.

It’s not that SharePoint itself is the problem. It’s that most organizations treat it like a junk drawer instead of a finely crafted workspace. They dump things in, hope for the best, and when they can’t find what they need, they curse the tool instead of the process.

That’s like blaming the chisel when your carving turns out like a disaster. The tool is only as good as the hands that shape it.

But here’s the thing—2025 is different. Hybrid work is real. AI is everywhere. Attention spans are shorter than ever. If your SharePoint intranet isn’t intuitive, engaging, and actually useful, your employees will abandon it faster than an overpriced gastropub serving “deconstructed” avocado toast.

So, how do we build something better?

Step One: Start with the Grain, Not the Chainsaw

My grandfather didn’t just start hacking away at a log. He studied it first, ran his hands over the knots, understood the tension inside. That’s what we need to do with SharePoint intranet design. Before a single page is built, before a single policy doc is uploaded, we need to understand how people actually work.

• Who are your users? Not just their titles, but their real needs. Are they in an office? Remote? Are they field workers checking on a tablet between job sites?

• What do they search for most? If people constantly need to find HR forms, policies, or project templates, those should be up front—not buried in some labyrinthine folder structure from a decade ago.

• How do they navigate? Do they want quick links? Search-driven content? AI recommendations? If you don’t ask, you’ll just be guessing.

Too many companies build intranets based on how leadership thinks people work instead of how they actually work. That’s like carving a bear when the wood was begging to be an eagle.

Step Two: Kill the Folder Mentality

Folders are the original sin of bad SharePoint design. You don’t need a thousand nested folders named “Final_V2_Approved” with a graveyard of old versions rotting inside. Modern SharePoint has metadata tagging, AI-powered search, and dynamic content display—so why are we still designing like it’s Windows 95?

Here’s the fix:

• Use metadata and tagging. Instead of burying documents in endless subfolders, use categories, tags, and filters. Let users sort dynamically instead of digging through layers of chaos.

• Leverage AI-driven search. SharePoint’s AI capabilities can suggest content based on what people actually use. Teach it what’s important, and it will surface the right things at the right time.

• Create role-based content hubs. Stop making every employee wade through an ocean of irrelevant documents. If marketing, finance, and IT all need different things, design spaces that cater to their specific needs.

Step Three: Make It a Place People Actually Want to Visit

The best restaurants don’t just serve good food. They create an experience. You walk in, and the atmosphere tells you everything—the lighting, the music, the smell of something sizzling just out of sight. Your intranet should do the same.

• Stop making it ugly. Your company’s intranet should not look like a government website from 2003. Use modern branding, clean layouts, and a content strategy that doesn’t make people’s eyes glaze over.

• Keep it fresh. Nothing says “we don’t care” like a homepage that hasn’t changed in years. Highlight company news, showcase employee spotlights, integrate a social feed—give people a reason to check in.

• Make it interactive. Embed videos, chatbots, interactive dashboards—anything that makes engagement feel like a natural part of the experience instead of a chore.

An intranet shouldn’t be a corporate relic collecting dust. It should be the heart of your organization’s digital culture.

Step Four: Treat It Like a Living Thing

A sculpture isn’t finished just because the last cut has been made. Wood shifts, settles, reacts to time. It needs care, refinishing, the occasional repair. Your SharePoint intranet is no different.

• Appoint real ownership. This isn’t just an IT project. Assign people who understand content, user behavior, and engagement to keep things running smoothly.

• Measure and adapt. Use analytics to see what’s working and what’s not. If people never visit a section, figure out why. If a search term keeps failing, fix it.

• Iterate constantly. Technology evolves. Your workforce evolves. Your intranet should evolve with them.

The Final Cut

Most corporate intranets are abandoned because they were never designed for real people in the first place. They’re digital landfills—cluttered, outdated, and frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The best SharePoint intranet isn’t the one with the most features, the most pages, or the most corporate-approved jargon. It’s the one that works—elegantly, intuitively, and without forcing people to fight it every step of the way.

Good design, whether in wood or in digital spaces, isn’t about control. It’s about understanding the material, respecting its nature, and revealing something better.

So, step back. Look at the grain. And carve something worth using.