Build an intranet

An intranet is a one-stop hub for company news, project information, collaboration tools, and whatever else employees need at work day to day.

Confluence is a great foundation, but customizations are the key to getting it to look, feel and operate like an intranet. Refined Sites for Confluence lets you turn selected spaces into fully-fledged intranets, by adding structure and organization, custom themes, and end-user personalization. And with Refined Sites for JSM (JSM), you can add service desks from Jira Service Management into the mix as well.

So how do you use Refined Sites to turn Confluence and JSM into an intranet? Let’s get into the basics.

Step 1: Prepare the content strategy for your intranet

First things first: prepare your content strategy. In short, you can see the strategy as a roadmap for creating, publishing, organizing and managing your intranet’s content.

A good starting point is to ask yourself the following questions:

What groups of users is the intranet for, and what are their unique needs?
What needs to be most easily accessible?
What is relevant for all users to have on the home page?
Will we integrate service desks to make it easy for employees to send requests to departments such as HR and IT?

Step 2: Prepare your base content in Confluence and JSM

Once you have your strategy sorted, organize your Confluence and JSM content. We recommend to consider the following:

Align your Confluence spaces with your content strategy for the intranet. If they’re not already, group pages and blog posts into spaces that align with the planned sections of your site. For instance, a Human Resources space can contain an employee directory page, a vacation policy page, an employee benefits page, etc. Keep in mind that while Confluence only lets you organize content into pages and spaces, Refined Sites adds another level of structure by letting you group together spaces — more on that later.
Ensure your spaces aren’t overcrowded. If a space contains a lot of pages and blogs and becomes hard to navigate, reconsider the purpose of the space and evaluate if it can be broken up into multiple dedicated spaces instead.
Set standards for how to create and format content on Confluence pages. Colleagues should be able to access these guidelines when creating content for the intranet, to avoid pages looking vastly different from each other. Consider using macros from Refined Toolkit to organize content on-page, making it easy to digest.
Set Confluence space and page permissions to ensure that content is only available to the right user groups. Those permissions are always respected on Refined sites, so if a user can't see a certain page in native Confluence, they won't see it on your site, either.
Use Refined Sites for JSM to add a new dimension of functionality to your intranet. By integrating service desks into your intranet, employees won’t have to go elsewhere to get help from departments such as IT or HR. Make an overview of the JSM projects you already have, or create new ones specifically for your intranet.

Step 3: Create your intranet site in Refined Sites

When you have your Confluence spaces and JSM projects ready to go, it’s time to turn it all into a site.

Go to the Refined Administration > Sites and click the + (plus) button to create a new site.
Give the site a catchy name and subdomain. While you are welcome to keep this URL (formatted as example.refined.site), we recommend you to set up a custom domain later. Changing the domain to intranet.yoursite.com, for example, clearly communicates the site’s purpose and makes it easy to remember for users — which makes sure they’ll keep finding their way to your intranet.
Head over to the Permissions tab to set your site access permissions to private. This way, only your organization’s employees with an Atlassian account can view the site.

Step 4: Add content and structure to your intranet

Go to the Site Builder tab to add content and structure to your site. The structure is reflected in the site’s navigation menu.

Add content to your intranet
Most sites consist of a mix of these items, which you add with the + Add Content button.

When you add a Confluence space, you create a landing page for the space. Through this page, users can access the Confluence space’s pages and blogs. Landing pages are customizable — we’ll get into that later on in this guide.
When you add a JSM project, you create a customizable landing page for the project. Users can create and view requests on this page.
A Refined Page is a customizable landing page. Although it is not connected to any specific Confluence or Jira content itself, you can use it to show content from the spaces and projects that you group underneath it in the Site Builder. Any item that you nest below a Refined Page appears in a dropdown list in your site’s navigation menu.
Menu Folders also let you create dropdown lists in the navigation menu. As opposed to a Refined Page, a Menu Folder doesn’t have a landing page.
Links let you direct users to any page you want, on or off your site, straight from your site’s navigation menu.

Structure your intranet
Simply drag and drop items to arrange them into a hierarchy. Group items underneath Refined Pages and Menu folders to create dropdown lists in the site navigation menu. The key to a successful hierarchy is to think about the relationships between spaces/projects and how they'll be used.

For example, you can create four menu folders which will be the main navigation menu items on your intranet: Teams, Projects, Resources and HR. Everything you group underneath these folders in the Site Builder appears in dropdown lists in the menu.

Menu folder	Can contain

Menu folder	Can contain
Teams	Two more menu folders (Product and Commercial), to create two columns in the dropdown list: The Product folder contains spaces about the Marketing team and Sales team. The Commercial folder contains spaces about the Design team, the Developers team and the Test and Support team.
Projects	Spaces used for documentation and collaboration.
Resources	Spaces with information about company strategies, processes and goals.
HR	Spaces with onboarding guides and employee handbooks. HR service desk (JSM project) to make it easy for employees to contact HR.

Step 5: Customize the home page and landing pages

Landing pages make your site come to life. You can customize your site’s homepage, as well as the landing pages for Refined Pages, Confluence spaces, Jira projects, and JSM projects.

For example, on a Refined Page about HR you can add:

Quick links to onboarding guides.
Common request types from the HR service desk.
A news feed of the latest updates in the employee handbook.

You bring pages to life in the Page Builder using building blocks called modules. Use them to add static info (such as icons that take users to the most important pages, a search field or intro paragraph about the page) as well as dynamic info fetched from spaces and projects (such as a news feed or a personalized list of requests).

Three tips for landing page success:

To create uniformity across your intranet, export and import page layouts. This way you easily standardize the looks of similar types of landing pages, for example those of the Product, Marketing, Finance and IT teams.
Need inspiration? The Page Builder includes a range of templates, including ones for navigation, documentation, and support. A template is merely a starting point — after applying it, you can further adjust the page.
Personalize the user experience. For example, use the text variable $userfirstname to welcome users to your intranet. Additionally, View Permissions let you decide who gets to see which content on the page - showing different users and user groups only what’s relevant to them.

Step 6: Apply space settings to customize Confluence pages and blog posts

Use Space Settings to further improve the user experience and boost engagement on your intranet:

If your intranet only features short pages, you can disable the estimated read time for a cleaner look of the page.
On the other hand, you can help users navigate long pages by adding a table of contents, which lists all headings on a page and moves with the user as they scroll down the page.
If your space contains a lot of pages, help users navigate it by adding a search field to the space’s left-hand side menu.

You have full control over the settings of each space: use global space settings to decide the default look of your spaces, and customize specific spaces with custom space settings.

Step 7: Make it easier for users to create requests

Combine the power of Jira Service Management (JSM) and Confluence on your sites, by adding Request Type links to your Confluence pages. This can for example simplify HR processes on your intranet: when reading the employee handbook, a user can quickly file a request on-page. When the request is sent, they’re back on the same employee handbook page and can carry on reading or browsing the space.. See the images below (click to enlarge).

Step 8: Theme your site to match your brand

Of course, your intranet should reflect your company's culture and identity. Add logos and create themes to apply your brand’s look and feel to your site.

You can apply themes site-wide, or you can differentiate parts of your intranet with variations on a theme. For example, the main site and common spaces can have one theme, while team spaces have another.
If you have multiple sites (your Refined Sites subscription allows you to create as many sites as you like), apply different themes to each of your sites. This way, a knowledge base and an intranet can have distinct looks.
You can also create themes for special occasions, like a holiday theme that you temporarily add to your intranet.

Step 9: Get the right collaborators on board by delegating permissions

Confluence and Jira administrators often aren’t the same people in charge of designing, structuring, and creating its underlying content. This is why you can give administrator permissions to any Confluence or Jira user in your organization, either for your entire Refined Sites instance or only for specific sites. This way you can be sure that space admins and key content creators are empowered to maintain their corner of the intranet.

Step 10: Keep users coming back

Building the intranet is just the start — keep it alive by adjusting it to your users' needs, ensuring adoption across your organization.

Do you often receive tickets on a topic, even though that information can be found on your site? This may indicate that the relevant page is hard to find. The promoted search results functionality lets you place a page at the top of search results when a user looks for specific search terms.
Gather feedback from users to improve your intranet. Use Space Settings to enable a Give Feedback button on Confluence pages and blog posts.
Communicate important information to your users by adding an announcement banner to the top of your intranet. For example, a banner can inform users of scheduled maintenance or an upcoming event.

What’s next?

For more intranet tips and inspiration, dive into our demo site and blogs:

And did you know that you can build an unlimited number of sites with your Refined Sites subscription? Use this to your advantage by transforming your Confluence and Jira instances into even more sites users love:

We’re always happy to help if you have any questions: reach out to support.