The problem
Staff across two countries and five divisions looked for the same things in different places. Policies sat in email attachments, forms on someone's drive, announcements in WhatsApp groups, and the answer to “how do I…” in whoever had been there longest. Nothing was wrong with any single channel. There was just no place where the company kept what it knew, and no one responsible for keeping it current.
The key decision
Give every division a home it owns, and give the company one place to see across them.
Each division got its own page, run by its own admin: news, announcements, wins, files, SOPs, events, FAQs. The people closest to the knowledge became responsible for it. Above the division pages sits a central page. When a division admin marks something as company-wide, it appears there for everyone. Otherwise it stays inside the division.
Ownership stays distributed; visibility is a choice.
One template, not five intranets
Letting each division design its own space would have rebuilt the scatter with nicer pages. So every division page uses the same template, and each division changes exactly two things: a primary colour and a secondary colour. A policy is always in the same place, whichever team you're in.
Colour as wayfinding
The division colour isn't decoration. It travels with the content. When HR's announcement appears on the central page, it arrives in HR's colour. Staff learn the palette the way they learn a transit map: they see purple and know it's HR before reading a word.
The architecture
Every visit follows one route. Staff sign in with their company email; the portal checks whether they're internal. Internal staff pass through single sign-on (JumpCloud) into the central page and every division. Anyone else is routed to an admin for permission. Inside each division, a second gate opens the admin section for the people who maintain it. Every page ends at the same place: a feedback link.
Adding a division means one new page from the template, one admin, and two colours. Nothing else changes.
The design system
The interface is built atomically. Text, colour and elements combine into molecules (a section title), molecules into organisms (an event row), organisms into templates (the events calendar), and templates into pages. Quicklinks, announcements, FAQ, social corner, calendar, spotlight and footer each have one specification and a rule for which pages use them.
What's designed, and what's built
I designed the structure, the ownership model, the user flow, the component system and every specification: 5rem between sections, 2rem between a title and its content, 10rem side margins, fixed heights and fixed type rules. An agency built it. The specification was the system: the agency didn't have to design anything.
Judgment calls
- The people closest to the knowledge own it. Division admins, not a central comms team, keep their pages current.
- Company-wide is opt-in. A division decides what the whole company sees. The central page stays relevant instead of becoming a dump.
- Colour codes origin, not mood. Two tokens per division, carried onto the central page, so every item shows where it came from.
- No Home in the navigation. The logo is always the way home, on every page.
- Every heading in the display face is set in capitals. A hard rule, written into the spec, so no page drifts.
- Cut the mood tracker. It wasn't ready, so it moved to phase 2 rather than shipping half-done. Its space went to a staff spotlight.
- Locked heights between neighbours. The division calendar matches the social corner beside it, so the grid never breaks as content grows.
- QA as before/after sheets. Every deviation in the build was documented against the spec with the exact fix.
Outcome
Deployed to 80+ staff across the UAE and KSA: five division pages, each run by its own admin, feeding one central page. For the first time the company had one place for its news, files, SOPs, events and people, and each division could see what the others were doing. It made the company visible to itself.
It was retired after the company was acquired in 2025 and moved onto the new group's systems.
What it doesn't prove
There are no usage metrics, only what staff and leadership reported. The build was an agency's, so implementation quality isn't mine to claim. Phase 2 never shipped before the acquisition. What it does prove is the part I owned: an ownership model and one specification that held five divisions and two countries to a single standard.