Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

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Branding your SharePoint 2007 Sites

Both SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 left a

lot to be desired when it came to the ease of applying corporate branding to

sites. The introduction of master pages, combined with the enterprise Web

content management Features of SharePoint Server 2007, helps alleviate

many of the issues experienced with previous versions. In this chapter, we will

examine some of the more common applications of branding, such as custom

color schemes, banners, and navigation, and show how they are achieved in

SharePoint Server 2007. The chapter is structured by first describing the vari-

ous functional components that SharePoint Server 2007 offers to help apply a

brand, such as master pages and page layouts. If you are already familiar with

these concepts and just want to get to a branding exercise, you can skip to the

end of the chapter, where we go through a couple of branding scenarios. It is

also important to note that this chapter is really intended to familiarize you

with the basics regarding customizing the look and feel of your site—more

detailed aspects of branding are explained further in Chapter 15, Site Defini-

tions and Templates, and Chapter 16, Features.

14.1 What is Branding?

One of the first requests that a developer or Web designer is likely to encoun-

ter when SharePoint is introduced to his or her company is, “Can I apply our

company’s look and feel to my SharePoint sites?” The look and feel, com-

monly referred to as branding, typically comprises customization of a site so

that all pages rendered to the user are consistent in their presentation. For

example, you could customize your site so that each page presented to the

user contains the same header, footer, and navigational structure. Branding is

important when deploying Web sites, as it not only provides a consistent

look and feel across all the pages in a site but also reduces the learning curve

from the end users’ perspective. Once a user becomes familiar with the layout

and usage of one page in your site, this knowledge becomes immediately

transferable to other pages the user visits, increasing the usability of your site.