Overview

When it comes to building your digital workplace it’s important to bring design and content together in formalized standards that ensure consistency, promote positive user experiences, and make your build process as efficient as possible. These standards are especially important for pages and areas that need to use repeated formats and for any templates you plan to create. 

Recommendations

Use the tips below to define these standards before you implement and build. 

• Page design: Set guidelines for the placement, style, and configuration of standard elements on pages (e.g. define a standard for the placement of a Search Box Widget for landing pages). Learn more about consistent page layouts. 
• Text format, styling, usage: Include text guidelines as part of your page design for repeatable elements, such as Widget titles and descriptions, as well as any other text elements that are a part of your standard page design.
• Navigational elements: Set guidelines for navigational elements (e.g. Navigation Widgets) within Spaces or key areas of the digital workplace to ensure users know exactly where to go to navigate the area. 
• Widget configurations: Set configuration guidelines for frequently used Widgets for particular use cases, so they all look, read, and behave the same way, especially if they are in the same area (e.g. Standardized background colors, text alignment and style, text color, and layout options for CTA and Link widgets) 
• Custom classes: Decide which custom classes you want to use within your digital workplace and what use cases these classes should be used for. Consider any exceptions to these rules you may want to accommodate. 
• Targeted searches: Determine guidelines for search configurations at the page/space level when using a Search Box Widget. (e.g. Do you want to search a particular area and filter by Wikis only?) 
• Style guide: Create a style guide for your digital workplace that includes the above standards and share this documentation with all key stakeholders involved with your digital workplace implementation/build and with those who will maintain your digital workplace moving forward. Publish this Style Guide in the Help Desk area for easy access and visibility. 

Bonus Tip: Determine global configurations before you build and incorporate these configurations into your design/content standards for implementation. This allows your Digital Workplace Builder to implement areas of your digital workplace while taking into consideration design, content, and configurations at the same time, making the build faster, easier, and much more efficient. Global configurations to address include: 

• Member Groups: Create the necessary Member Groups required for launch to assign permissions to the appropriate content areas as they are being built. 
• Permissions: Set permissions at the root level and avoid setting any permissions for individuals. Apply additional levels of access for specific areas as needed, only using Member Groups.  
• Subscriptions: Define and apply subscriptions settings for each area and channel and apply those settings during the build process. 
• Tagging/labeling strategy: Before publishing content during the implementation phase, make sure you have your tagging/labeling strategy defined and that the appropriate labels are created and ready to be applied to content during the build process. 
• Moderation: Set up moderation for channels as required according to your digital workplace, content, and governance plans.