Professional SharePoint® 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

136

❘

CHAPTER 5 SIMPLE BRANDING

make minor changes. Be aware, though that the out-of-the-box master pages basically have zero

comments and their formatting is very specifi c to their particular look and feel. Chapter 8 discusses

other options that are more appropriate for creating highly branded master pages. That said, if you

only need to make minor changes, or add/remove something, you should be fi ne starting with an

out-of-the-box master page.

The following example uses SharePoint Designer 2010 to create a new master page using

v4.master

as a starting point to create a centered, fi xed-width layout. This type of design is popular for public-

facing sites that use a more structured look and feel. Although this example uses a SharePoint Server

2010 publishing site, if you have SharePoint Foundation 2010 you can still accomplish the same

branding (although some of the steps may be different).

1. Open SharePoint Designer 2010 and load the SharePoint Server 2010 publishing site.

2. From the Site Objects menu on the left, click Master Pages (see Figure 5-42).

FIGURE 542

3. From the list of master pages, click next to v4.master. Then, from the ribbon, click Copy

and then Paste. This will create a duplicate of

v4.master named v4_copy(1).master.

4. Click Rename from the ribbon and then rename v4_copy(1).master to v4_centered

.master

.

5. Click v4_centered.master and the click Edit File ...