An intranet is a private website that only people inside one organisation can reach. From the outside it looks like a normal site, but you need to be on the company network or log in with company credentials to get in. It is where staff find news, documents, procedures and internal tools in one place.
Think of an office building with a keycard at the door. Anyone can see the building from the street, but only employees with a card get past the lobby. An intranet works the same way: it sits behind authentication so only the right people enter. Where a customer portal serves clients, an intranet serves the team, gathering the scattered bits of company life into one trusted hub.
In practice an intranet is often a web application rather than a simple set of pages. It might handle holiday requests, show who is in which department, host onboarding material, and link out to every system staff use daily. Larger organisations build elaborate ones; a small business might run a lightweight version on the same tools as its public site. The hard part is rarely the technology. It is keeping the thing useful. Plenty of intranets start full of energy and then rot into a graveyard of outdated policies nobody trusts, so people drift back to asking a colleague or digging through email. The fix is to put the few daily tasks people actually need, the payslip, the leave button, the right phone number, front and centre, and to give content a clear owner so it stays current.
At TopDevs we build intranets that staff actually want to open, focused on the daily tasks that matter rather than a wall of links nobody reads.
