Real World SharePoint® 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 22 MVPs

Chapter 18. Understanding Branding in SharePoint 2010

By Randy Drisgill

Thus far, this book has focused primarily on developers and IT professionals. This chapter is geared toward the user interface designers and those who need to know how to make SharePoint 2010 look as great as it performs.

This chapter begins by explaining what branding for SharePoint is, and then describes some of the newer branding features that have been introduced in the 2010 version. Finally, this chapter describes the basic steps necessary for creating a website that doesn't look like the default SharePoint experience.

INTRODUCTION TO SHAREPOINT BRANDING

In general, branding is the act of creating a specific image or identity that people will recognize in relation to a company. When referring to websites, branding usually involves the colors, fonts, logos, and supporting graphics that make up the general look and feel of the site. Branding for SharePoint sites is not very different from any other website, except that the branding topic for SharePoint includes the creation of master pages, page layouts, cascading style sheets (CSS), web parts, and eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).

Branding certainly sounds a lot like traditional design, so why is branding the popular term when it comes to SharePoint design? The answer is a simple case of alleviating confusion.

Often, when it comes to enterprise software, the word "design" can be confused with a lot of different activities. Depending on the ...