Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Designing Web Pages

There are many ways to design, deploy, and manage Web pages. This process can be daunting, especially when you have the challenge of maintaining a custom enterprise portal, which in many cases involves many content authors and must tie into both the internal and external presence of a typical business. Though there may be many solutions and opinions in your organization of how Web publishing should be done, you must still ensure a uniform experience for users at all levels. Providing a consistent look and feel can be challenging, but in our Web-enabled lives, it is completely necessary and useful given the amount of time we spend sharing and consuming knowledge via Web technologies.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 simplifies the design process by breaking down the Web pages into modular elements for ease of customization and authoring. This is the result of including the powerful content management features of Microsoft Content Management Server in the SharePoint platform.

Master Pages, Page Layouts, and Field Controls are the primary elements of the publishing infrastructure in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

• Master Pages: Master pages define the site’s look and feel. In addition, master pages reveal the global elements of the site, such as the top navigation in a default deployment.

• Page Layouts: Page layouts provide the definition of the content on each page, as well as the means by which content is stored and made available to content authors ...