I’m really new to branding SharePoint, my artistic skills being comparable to that of a ferret with a paintbrush, but I have had to do some tweaking of branding that have caused me some pain.

Firstly let me say that I think that the world of SharePoint branding would be in dire straits (not the band) if it wasn’t for Heather Solomon and her blog located here.

She has some fantastic items in the blog, the most frequently of which I use is the CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services v3) which details the CSS reference for all those pesky things that you want to branding in SharePoint and WSS.

So for some tips, I’m going to add to this as we go along and if anyone has any suggestions then please let me know and I can add them here as well!

Branding Tools

• SharePoint Designer: Used to edit CSS, Master Pages and add images
• IE Developer ToolBar: Indispensable tool to work out what the hell is going on when a page is rendered. Comes out of the box with IE 8 and some added features.
• FireBug: Once again this another tool to view CSS but I really think that the features of FireBug are a lot better than that of IE Dev Toolbar. For instance the “View Style Information” feature:


and also the “HTML View”

Collaboration Site Branding

• Collaboration Sites cannot have their Master Page changed out of the box, the only changes that can be made are CSS changes through themes.
• If you do want Collaboration sites to have branding features  such as custom master pages then you must enable the “Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure” feature to be able to change the Master page.

Publishing Site Branding

• Try to use page layouts and publishing fields as much as possible.  Andrew OConnell gives the definitive explanation here
• If a Page Layout is not checked in that the default.aspx page is based on, published and approved as a major version then the user will see the link to the site in the menu (if applicable), can visit all of the other content in the site but will get a “File Not Found” error, which is useless for all intensive purposes.

Internet Branding

• Be prepared for some real fun when testing on other browsers apart from IE!!!

Branding Tips

• Anything in the /_layouts pages is not branded using the Site or System master pages but in another Master page that resides on the file system called “Application.Master“. Now you can in theory change this but like always you should never touch any file directly in the [12] Hive. You can achieve a certain amount of customization with CSS only but usually most organizations don’t even bother have any branding on these pages.
• If only one placeholder is missing from a Master Page you will get an error that will be difficult to track down unless you have debugging turned on for the Web Application.
• The navigation does not persist across site collections. Be careful how you structure your sites otherwise you will need to write your own Navigation Provider, although MOSS comes with quite a few (listed here in Shantha Kumar’s blog, or create you own ASP.NET menu which you can also do.

Economics of Branding

• Branding  is finicky, time consuming and costs money. For smaller SharePoint products branding can really drive up the cost of the total implementation. Some more cost effective branding can be achieved by the following:
  • Don’t use custom master pages but create a theme or CSS file instead.
  • Always change the logo of the client by changing the site logo. There are a number of ways to do this (change the Master, change the logo in the database..ouch) or the easiest is simply to “Title, Description and Icon” page in Site Settings->Title, Description and Icon and point to a new logo that you have uploaded to the [12] hive.
  • Try to get the client to focus on functionality instead.
  • Make sure that you tell the client that branding SharePoint takes much, much longer than branding other Internet Platforms whose main purpose is static content.
  • If you are using a branding company you have to be very clear and specific, with both them and the client, what is possible out of the box and what is needed from the branding company. Many times an outside graphic design company comes up with an amazing Intranet design which will have to be tweaked because the cost in implementing it is too much. If money was no object we could do this, but in these times….