Web site design extranets
Blending Intranet and web site designAn extranet is a special set of pages that are made available to selected business partners such that they can directly access computational resources inside your company. Typical examples include allowing customers to check on the status of their order status and allowing approved vendors to look at requests for proposals.
The extranet is a blend of the public web site and the closed intranet and needs to be designed as such. Fundamentally, an extranet is a part of the Internet since it is accessed by people in many different companies who will be using your public web site but will not have access to the truly internal parts of your intranet. Therefore, the visual style and main navigation options of the extranet should be visibly similar to the web site design of your public web site. Your business partners should feel that the two sites come from the same company. A subtle difference in the two styles (e.g., complimentary color tones) will help emphasize the closed and confidential nature of the extranet.
It will often be reasonable to have links from extranet pages to pages on the public web site, but you should not have links that point to your private intranet since your business partners will not be able to follow such links.
Extranet and Intranet
Actual use of the extranet shares many properties with intranet use: the users will be using the extranet as a major part of their everyday job, so it will be possible to use specialized language and relatively complex interactions. It may even be reasonable to assume some amount of training on the part of the users, since they will be motivated to improve the efficiency of their own business by making better use of your extranet. The training needs and the complexity of your extranet can not be too demanding, however, since you normally cannot assume that extranet users are dedicated to the use of your particular design and nothing else. A typical extranet user may be a corporate purchasing agent who may need to deal with your extranet as well as the extranets of, say, 50 other companies where he or she has placed orders. Your extranet must be fairly easy to use if this purchasing agent is to remember its features and options from one visit to the next.
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