Intranetizen is back

It’s been some time since we have written a post. Actually, it’s been over five months, which has surprised a lot of people, especially the four of us. We did receive a lot of questions if Intranetizen was over, or did we have a genius plan that no one could figure out. Our silence wasn’t because we didn’t have any ideas, or insights or controversial things to say. We definitely had a lot of those and some of you may have heard about our ideas or rants if you ran into us. Even though we looked inactive by not publishing any new posts, a lot of work was going on in the background.

Where was Intranetizen?

January 2014, the four of us met at Jon’s house to do a strategy and planning session. We all felt the blog needed a bit of reworking. It had, in exactly the way we warn everyone about, grown organically without any clear strategy or direction.

We had a lot of posts covering a lot of topics; how could we organise those better?

We got a lot of good feedback on our vendor review series‘ and regularly found ourselves pointing people to them on twitter. How could we make them easier to find and also make it easier for the ever growing number of vendors to submit details of their products to us?

Some of our best articles weren’t written by us; how could we make it easier for guests to write for us? Did people even realise they could?

We had a lot of questions, a lot of ideas but not a lot of time. We wanted to use the methodologies and practices we use in our day jobs because we believe in them.

What did we learn along the way?

For starters, it became clear how much we all like our little blog, and while we were away how much we missed sharing our ideas, rants and advice and hearing your comments, feedback and appreciation.

We found that the simplest design decisions can elicit a torrent of arguments and reasoning.  For example, we knew we didn’t want to use the puke-green theme any more, but what colour should we be?  Colour psychology, brand differentiation, personal preferences were all cited as reasons for a particular colour scheme.

Having a big goal on the distant horizon can distract you from the simple things you could be doing now. There was no reason we couldn’t have kept posting while we were working on the new site, but we didn’t.

Lastly, we found that the best way to get something done is to just do it.  We had been telling people that, “Intranetizen will be back soon. It’s going to be orange!” for months. But we kept finding reasons not to do the work required. In the end we had to accept it wasn’t going to be perfect and that we would go live and keep on improving over time.

What do you think?

Of course, we’d love to hear your opinion.  Please leave comments here or contact us privately or on Twitter. We have a heap of other ideas for Intranetizen but we want to be guided by you.

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