I’ve been working on a top-secret project at work, one that I can’t tell you about. Let me just say that it would be really cool if the project makes it all the way to fruition, and if makes it, you can be sure that I’ll tell you what it is, and even try to get you to help it succeed in some way.

But for now, that top-secret project is kind of on hold. It’s not completely on hold, because I continue to think about it, and I continue to talk about it with those who have high enough security clearance to hear about it. But the project is on hold in the way that I need to stop working on it for a while and work on something else — though even then, when working on this new project (which I’ll tell you about in a just a moment), I’m supposed to be trying to figure out how I can transpose the lessons of the new one to the old one, so while, technically, the top-secret project is on hold, I’m really just working on it by proxy.

My new project is relatively simple. I have to help rebuild my employer’s corporate website. The current website is rather less behaved than we need it to be, and instead of trying to making it into the website we want — a process too complex to justify — we’re going to take it out back and smack it with the shovel. Then we’re gonna go to the store and get a sparkly new website that will do exactly what we tell it to do, because that’s the kind of website we’ll tell the proprietor we want: something that eats when it’s supposed to and shits where it’s supposed to, and maybe even once in a while, stroll down the street with such pride that it makes us into the website owners we always wanted to be, the kind who is noticed by everyone else.

Here’s our task. First, we have to build a regular old website. We have to do this because people expect it, and because someone out there has decided that “this is the way business websites look,” and they told enough old-people-with-important-job-titles to make it true. Second, we have to build a completely new kind of website, one that shows that we’re not only on top of the latest trends in web strategy, but that we’re ahead of them too, that we are trendsetters ourselves. These two tasks must be accomplished within the exact same space: the confines of a single website.

Let me make one thing straight. I do not disagree with this strategy. It is exactly what we must do if we are to rebuild our corporate website. We must do the first task because our audience expects to recognize a business website when they see one, and we must do the second because we need to exceed expectations every chance we get. We can’t revolutionize ourselves right out of our traditional market-space, but at the same time, we must portray the ability to be revolutionary when the situation demands it.

It’s an interesting project to work on, simply because of that dichotomy. For the next 24 hours or so, I need to imagine this nonexistent website, and then I need to explain it in a somewhat technical document. I need to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet, then write about it. Now that’s a good time, if I do say so myself.

There’s a 99% chance that the company you work for has a corporate website. Unless it’s one of those corporate websites that has an employee login, the kind that houses your digital time-sheet and where maybe, if you work offsite, you go to fill out your company’s version of TPS reports, unless your job actually depends on it, then I’m betting you haven’t been to your company’s website since the last time someone told you go there. There’s just no motivation for it. All it is is a brochure for people who don’t know anything about the company, who don’t know that your manager is divorced because he fell in love with a sheep, and who don’t know that the head of the marketing department can’t get through a meeting unless she takes a pull from her one-hitter first, and who don’t know that the guy in charge of sales couldn’t close a deal without his assistant doing all of the work, and who don’t know that said assistant is subscribed to a competitor’s e-mail newsletter in the hope that someday the competitor may have an opening in her field.

Why the hell would anyone who lives in the company’s dirty laundry go to the corporate website? The only result is an increase in cynicism, thanks to all the marketing sleaze they find. If your company has a corporate website, then not only do you not go there, but it’s altogether in your company’s best interest that you continue to not do so.

But one of the subtasks for the website I need to build is to make it the kind of corporate website that invites the company’s other employees to participate. This falls under the “current web trends” category. You see, today’s Web, as I’ve tried to explain before, is all about participation. It ignores the idea of a single authority and trusts in the crowd. For this corporate website project, “the crowd” means, in part, the other employees of the corporation.

Put another way, this aspect of the website can be conceived as a kind of classroom, with the employees serving as both students and teachers to their peers. But then again, can you imagine going to your corporate website and engaging in a professional dialog with the person who may be just two cubicles over? Wouldn’t it make more sense just to get up and have the conversation in person?

Think of the baby-boomers though. Or better yet, think of my company. In the next three months, one of the senior executives is going to retire. He’s a rich character, a great old Irish son-of-a-bitch that I’ve only met in person a couple of times because I work in a completely different region of the country, but who is always just a complete joy to talk to on the phone. He’s got the feel of your favorite uncle. A guy you can give shit to, because you know he’ll give it back. A fun guy, and I’m gonna miss him.

But that’s not what’s important here. What’s important is that when he walks out the door for the last time, our company is losing a valuable resource. He’s been here a long time. We’re talking 15 years here. He knows what works and what doesn’t, and he knows it because he’s probably tried it before. Imagine how much richer our company could be — and richer is used for both its emotional and monetary meanings — if we had a record of some of the insights that this valuable individual has had over the years; if instead of walking two cubicles down and talking about an issue, he went to the company website and wrote about it. If we had a record of his thoughts on a given subject, think about the employee who is hired six months from now, the person who, though never having met the man, came upon his insights, a new employee who now has the benefit of this man’s wisdom, this man’s experience. How much more valuable is that employee now? How much richer is the company?

So that’s part of my task. To come up with a way to make the website not only valuable for our clients and potential clients, but valuable also for our employees.

I’m not entirely sure how to do that. How do you engage people who may not want to be engaged? I mean, you gotta think that a good percentage of the employees in any corporation are there simply because they need a job. They’re not there because they buy into the mission of the company or because they truly believe it allows them to make a positive difference in the world. Hell, the cynic in me says that most people couldn’t care less if they’re making a positive difference in the world, as long as they get theirs, and here I am trying to get them to appreciate their jobs on an intellectual level, to think about their jobs in the abstract and commit to immortal record their theory on how to do their job better. How do you motivate a group to get philosophical?

I mean, I can think of the process by which they can do so. I can imagine a localized version of the blogosphere where the employees of the company engage in a dialog with each other via posts and comments, but if these people were the type to do so, wouldn’t they already be doing so? What I mean is, there’s nothing to stop them from doing it now. I know of only one other person in my company who blogs. Why don’t the others? Do we really think that by including the opportunity on our website that they actually will? My point is this: the technical features I would add to our corporate website to enable the process of an employee blogosphere are already in existence in the common blogosphere, and they have far more resonance there. There’s no need to recreate the wheel just because we can.

Instead of building a blog-engine for the company, then, it might be more useful if we simply engaged in an internal marketing program for blogging in general, and then, on our corporate website, simply maintain an index of those blogs, and perhaps not in a simple list of links to the blogs, but in such a way as to utilize relevant content from them, i.e., to institute RSS feeds of a particular category of posts from each of the blogs onto our site. This way, when visitors came to that particular section of the corporate website, they are not seeing what the marketing department wants them to see, but rather, they get the opportunity to experience the company as it is, to see us for who we are, to, in essence, digitally break bread with the company, as in the Latin com panis: with bread.

While getting our employees engaged with the site is just one subtask of many, it is, I think, my most difficult one. But thinking about this shit really makes for a fun job, so who am I to complain.

But let me ask you a question: what kind of thing would you like to find on your employer’s corporate website? Is there anything that would make it a regular stop on your weekly or daily rounds of the Web? What would your corporate site need to compete against sites like ESPN.com for your attention? I guess in other words, the best way to ask what I’m asking is this: How could your employer’s corporate website be more fun to experience and more valuable in the accomplishment of your day-to-day job?