Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

FOREWORD

Whenever I talk to people at a conference about SharePoint, invariably I am approached by some-

one — who has never worked with SharePoint before — and asked, “So, what is SharePoint? What

does it do?” These questions tend to fl ummox me a little, because SharePoint is an extremely fl exible

tool that can do just about anything. Companies use SharePoint to put up small internal sites for

specifi c projects, huge corporate intranets, extranets for those working at home or abroad, or even

Internet-facing websites. In fact, if you’re the average Internet user, I’d bet you’ve visited quite a few

sites in just the last week without realizing that they were built on SharePoint.

Of course, it’s no longer enough to be simply functional. Today, experiences must be eye-catching,

clean, and designed specifi cally for their own purpose. It’s vital that with a single glance, a user

knows where they are and what they can do on the site. Providing that kind of experience involves

at least a few elements of custom design.

While the new theming engine in SharePoint 2010 is quite powerful and allows you to pick any

custom colors and fonts you’d like to use to theme your site, colors and fonts are often just a piece

of the larger design. Custom images, layouts, navigation, site structure, and more are vital parts

of a custom design, but using those with SharePoint can require specifi c knowledge of the way

SharePoint works and how to fi t branding into it.

If anyone knows about branding Sha