How to brand a SharePoint Portal or Site for best results – Part 2
March 1st, 2006 // 3:03 pm @ Amar
For this entry I will focus on CSS branding. This is the easiest way to brand an out of box SharePoint installation. Every entity in SharePoint ( table, header, page header, title bar, web part header, etc ) there is a class defined.
SharePoint defines these classes in various css files located at C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions60TEMPLATELAYOUTS1033STYLES. I won’t go into a lot of details on what each style corresponds to. A comprehensive list is available from the MSDN article Customizing SharePoint Sites and Portals: Style Sheet Class Reference Tables, Part 3.
One thing to be careful here, is that these files are common per server. So if you are running 2 portals from the same server, any change to these will affect both your portal or wss installations. Also, these changes are site or portal wide as the case may be, and cannot be used to selectively brand a particular site or area.
Themes can be used in such a case, but personally I tend not to use them a lot as they just cause confusion on which is the actual file responsible for the design. But if you business case justifies it, you can very well use themes. They just provide an addition layer of css over the default css styles.
Most of my branding assignments are based on full customization of all the templates. I will discuss this in detail later on. It offers a lot of flexibility but is the most painful to implement.
Category : SharePoint