Spam has become the scourge of many of our email lives.  Clogging up our inboxes with promises of inheriting African fortunes, extending more than our bank balances, or getting our hands on prescription drugs, these unwelcome messages do nothing more than slow us down when we’re trying to get a days work done.

Unfortunately this phenomenon isn’t isolated to our email.  Many businesses are realising their intranet and large parts of their websites are wasteland.  Their staff and customers have to work through pages and pages of dross to get to anything useful.

A 2003 report by the IDC concluded “Knowledge workers spend 15–30% of their day searching for information.  More than half of their searches fail.”  The reason for this is clear – much of content on intranets and websites is poorly written and poorly organised.  This means that users experiences on intranets and websites is similar to that on email – it is full of spam.  It is ironic because whilst many email spammers have malicious intent, organisations are very often earnestly seeking to help their staff and customers.

There are reasons why many organisations find themselves in this quandary.  They have no publishing guidelines, or standards and anyone can add information to the intranet, of any style and to any location.  Very often there is no editor or overall manager who has full control over all of the information.  Those with modest experience of publishing produce verbose documents which are much too long and not centred on the reader’s needs.

Bad, poorly structured content is worse than no content at all.  In our time pressured working life, the last thing we should be doing is wasting the time of our staff or customers.  And like the weed of email spam, bad content on your website and intranet will smother the good content and smother the good will of your audiences.

Here are some questions which I would encourage you to consider:

• Have you reviewed your website or intranet traffic reports to check to see if there are any parts of either system which have never been viewed?
• If there are such pages, have your removed them?
• Have you put yourself in the shoes of your staff or customers, and tried to carry out some sample tasks on your intranet system?
• How easy or difficult was it?
• Do you have publishing guidelines or standards in place for your intranet, to ensure that someone with overall control can make certain that it meets its objectives?
• Have you an editor in place for these publishing platforms who has control over everything in same way a newspaper editor has full control over everything which goes on with their paper?

Badly written badly structured content is no better than spam. Please remember that deciding what not to publish is just as important as deciding what to publish.