Have you ever thought it would be nice to have an intranet site for your utility team members but were afraid of the expertise, costs, and time involved in creating and maintaining a site? Put your fears aside and read on.

You don’t need to hold an IT degree or write a big check to build an electronic home to house all your content in one convenient place. Use a free platform, such as Google Sites or others, to create a secure company intranet site of your own. The website provider will guide you through the setup and design process. You can start a site from scratch or use a template – no coding experience required. This also means you’ll never have to worry about asking your organization’s IT help desk to keep the site up to date.

Free site creation and hosting platforms offer:

• Single-click page creation
• The ability to customize the look and feel of your site with logos and colors
• Many pre-built templates from which to choose

You can use an intranet site to:

• House general information about your organization
• Include links to benefits and programs
• Post PDFs, photos, and videos

When comparing various free website providers, look at the amount of storage space each allows. Also be aware that free sites often give you a subdomain of their domain. To have your own domain name, you may have to upgrade. Typically, though, the annual cost of your own domain is low.