Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

INTRODUCTION

WHEN IT COMES TO working with SharePoint, there always seems to be a gap between develop-

ers and designers. To make the SharePoint user interface really look nice requires a designer who

is comfortable with design theory and traditional web technologies and has the ability to deal

with topics that are traditionally handled by developers. When you fi rst look at trying to brand a

SharePoint site, it can often seem like an insurmountable task; designing for SharePoint is different

from designing for your own website or your own custom code. Designing for SharePoint involves

overriding and adjusting a design to fi t within someone else’s code — in this case, Microsoft’s

out-of-the-box SharePoint code. But don’t be alarmed. This book aims to provide you with all the

knowledge and techniques you need to bridge the gap.

Not everyone who picks up this book is looking to become the next Picasso of SharePoint. For those

readers, a portion of the book is dedicated to understanding just enough about SharePoint branding

to apply some custom style to their sites. Parts I and II of the book introduce SharePoint branding

and provide simple techniques for making SharePoint look like something other than Microsoft’s

default user interface. Some of the other topics covered in the book include understanding what’s

new in SharePoint 2010, planning for branding projects, an overview of SharePoint Designer 2010,

working with SharePoint navigation, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), master page ...