SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Customizing Sharepoint Sites

Ideally you will start with creating a site within Office SharePoint Server 2007 and then open it with SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize the site. We will start off with a basic team site on Office SharePoint Server 2007. When you open the site in SharePoint Designer 2007, you will see the screen as shown in Figure 19-3.

One of the most common tasks performed with customizing a site is branding the site to match a corporate site or intranet site. The most common changes include modifying the logo, changing style sheets, switching fonts, and realigning content to get the desired look and feel.

As you can see in Figure 19-4, SharePoint Designer 2007 provides many tools for performing these changes.

SharePoint Designer can be divided into five main zones:

Folder List

Shows the list of files that are a part of this site.

Tag Properties

Shows the properties.

Figure 19-3. Basic team site

Toolbox

Shows the available components.

CSS Style Management

Allows you to easily adjust style attributes.

Main Content

Gives you an editor for viewing and changing a page.

You can add text or images to placeholders by selecting a placeholder and then making changes. For example, you can drag images that reside in your site from the folder list into the placeholder. Figure 19-5 shows how we can select a placeholder and edit it to create custom content.

Click on Create Custom Content. This ...