Beginning SharePoint® 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007

13.4. Customizing the Look and Feel of a WCM Site

While the tools of Web Content Management in SharePoint 2007 are quite powerful, you'll probably want to customize the look and feel of your site so that it is more in tune with your organization's unique identity. Fortunately, SharePoint 2007 gives you some great options:

• Master pages: Master pages control the UI or "chrome" elements of a website which are usually shared across all pages — items such as a company logo, navigation menu, or footer. Making a change to the master page subsequently changes all pages that inherit it. This option is commonly used when you want to customize the entire layout of your site.

• Page layout: This standardizes what and where content displays on a page. A page layout is to the content as the master page is to the UI. You often use page layout to create specific types of content for your site, such as a Newsletter.

• Document conversion: This basically involves taking a document, such as a Word file or an InfoPath form, and converting it to a web page for display in the browser. You often use this to create browser-based forms from InfoPath.

The real magic of WCM is that content is separate from the pieces you use to change the look of the page. Therefore, you can swap out content, and not change the page appearance or change a site's look and feel without too many extra steps. This section explores each of these options in greater detail so that you know exactly what you're changing and how best to ...