How to brand a SharePoint Portal or Site for best results – Part 1

How to brand a SharePoint Portal or Site for best results – Part 1

February 23rd, 2006 // 3:16 pm @ Amar

Recently I have been involved in many projects on branding and customizing SharePoint. Hence I decided that combining everything I have learnt from it would make a good topic for a series of posts. I find very less tutorials on how to effectively brand SharePoint. By effectively, I mean, giving the maximum amount of flexibility which not necessarily is the easiest thing to do.

Let’s try to see in how many ways can you brand sharepoint.

1. Style sheet branding. This is a quick and easy way to brand your SharePoint site, but all you can achieve with it, is change the color, text and html element styling etc. You are stuck with the page layout, webpart zones and available web parts in your page or template.


2. Themes. Similar to the above, but in reality I tend to stay away form them.


3. Templates. The most cumbersome but effective way to brand SharePoint. In my experience I have found this to be the only reliable way to effectively achieve all your branding needs ( coupled with style sheets ).


4. Onet.xml. This is the only way to customize a site definition. On the branding side it does not help much, except define an alternate header and css files. It is also used to pre-populate webpart zones with webparts on site creation.

I do not recommend any of our clients to use frontpage with SharePoint and hence tend to steer clear with anything that has to do with Frontpage. Will post more on my recommendations on how best to effectively brand your portal / site in coming articles.

Category : SharePoint