A publishing standard is the set of rules authors work to when they build a page. Common contents include how a page is structured and which template it starts from, where images come from, how headings and link text are written, what accessibility requires, and whether anything needs approving before it goes live.
Whoever manages the intranet decides what the standard says, usually internal communications and, where a brand team exists, jointly with them. What belongs in it is whatever an author would otherwise guess at and whatever has the same answer across the intranet.
Who is answerable for authors following the standard
Deciding what the standard says and holding authors to it are separate jobs. On many intranets internal communications does both, writing the standard and publishing most of the content itself. The question gets harder where authoring is devolved and a team in HR, finance or a regional office publishes its own pages.
Our view is that accountability for those authors sits with the area that publishes, and that the intranet team keeps the right to require a page be corrected. Only the area's own management can make working to the standard part of what an author is expected to do. Without the central right of correction, the standard turns advisory the moment an area decides it has other priorities.
Branding
Larger organizations often have a brand team with a standard that predates the intranet, and an intranet built to that standard will sometimes fall short of it. SharePoint is a content management system rather than a website, and the theme, header, navigation and footer options are a set of choices rather than a blank canvas. A specification written for print or for the public website may have no equivalent in the product.
What tends to work is a standard set jointly and written down as an intranet specific brand guideline, with the intranet team owning it from there.
While the branding controls in SharePoint are limited, a few do work across the tenant. A SharePoint administrator can define custom themes and hide the default ones, and the SharePoint Brand Center can hold a set of fonts, colors and themes.
Page templates and site templates
Two different things get called a template. A page template is a copy of a page saved as a starting point for future pages. A site template, formerly a site design, is applied when a site is created and can also be applied to an existing modern site.
Neither is a control. A page template can be set as the default selection on a site, and an author can still choose a blank page. A custom site template can be the default for new sites, and a site owner can apply a different one afterwards. Page templates also cannot be used across sites, so the same template is recreated wherever it is needed.
Our view is that templates belong in the standard as a strong recommendation rather than as a requirement. Nothing in SharePoint holds an author to one, and requiring something the platform cannot check gives the intranet team a policing job instead of a standard.
Page approval
Page approval means a page does not publish until somebody accepts it. A site owner configures it on the Site Pages library, where it runs as a Power Automate flow, and an Approval Status column then shows whether a page is Draft, Pending, Accepted or Rejected.
As configured, approval applies to every page on a site rather than to a chosen few, although the flow can be customized so that, for example, news posts need approving and other pages do not. Short of that work on the flow, an area that wants approval on its own ends up with its own site.
Approval across a whole intranet is unusual. More often it covers the areas where an incorrect page has consequences, such as policies and HR content. Trained authors are free to publish directly elsewhere. A scheduled page on a site with approval configured does not publish until it is approved.
Accessibility as a requirement rather than advice
Accessibility sits differently in the standard from everything else in it. Many organizations have already committed to it in a policy or a published statement covering internal systems as well as customer-facing ones, so on the intranet an existing requirement is being applied rather than a preference expressed.
What the standard asks of an author is mostly a short list, although organizations may add to it:
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- Headings run in order, so somebody using a screen reader can move through a page by its structure instead of reading all of it.
- Images that carry meaning have alt text, and decorative ones do not, since a description of a background photograph is noise.
- Link text says where the link goes, which is what makes a list of links usable away from the sentence around it.
- Tables have a header row.
- Color is not the only thing separating one item from another.
The Pages Authoring Accessibility Assistant is a checker inside the page editor that scans a page and lists what it finds. Microsoft documents it as checking five web parts, Text, Image, Quick links, Hero and Banner, across five categories: page structure such as heading order, missing alt text, blank links, tables such as a missing table header, and color and contrast.
Nothing is documented beyond those five web parts, so a page built largely from others can come back clean without having been checked in any meaningful sense. That matters before a standard names the assistant as its accessibility check.
Training the people who publish
Authors learn the standard from the pages already published and from whoever showed them the editor. A standard nobody was taught is a document that gets quoted after the fact.
What closes that gap is a plan for authors rather than another document: an induction for anybody who gets edit rights, a refresher when the standard changes, and a named person who answers questions about it. Some organizations make edit access contingent on completing the training, which is the only arrangement in this post with a mechanism behind it, because permissions are what an intranet team can actually withhold.
Where the mechanics stop short
SharePoint helps an author build a good page yet does nothing to require this. No setting blocks a page created outside a template, no report lists the pages that break your standard, and no policy applies approval across a set of sites at once. The one hard gate is page approval, and it works at the level of a whole site.
So a publishing standard holds up through habit, through training, and through who has edit rights on a site. SharePoint can narrow the choices in front of an author and make the standard the easiest route through the editor. Holding anybody to it is work that happens outside the product.
Common questions
What should a SharePoint intranet publishing standard include?
Anything an author would otherwise have to guess at, which in most standards covers page structure, images, writing conventions, accessibility and approval. Whether a rule belongs comes down to whether the answer is the same across the intranet, since a rule that applies to one publishing area belongs to that area rather than to the standard everybody reads.
Can you enforce the use of page templates in SharePoint?
No. A page template can be set as the default selection on a site, but an author can still start from a blank page, and Microsoft documents no setting that requires a template. Page templates also cannot be used across sites, so the same template is recreated on each site that needs it.
Should you use page approval on intranet pages?
It suits the areas where an incorrect page has consequences, such as policies and HR content, and trained authors are usually left to publish directly elsewhere. As configured, approval applies to every page on the site, and separating news from the rest means customizing the flow rather than changing a setting.
