What Is SharePoint Branding?
In today’s world, we’re inundated with marketing, and branding is a common buzzword. Branding is the act of building a specific image or identity that people recognize in relation to your company. The most common examples include companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike who are recognizable by simply seeing their logo. Companies are now trying to convey their brand through electronic media, such as a Web site, through the use of colors, fonts, and supporting graphics that create the general look and feel of a corporate Web site. Branding for SharePoint takes this one step further by conveying a brand through a combination of master pages, themes, page layouts, cascading style sheets (CSS), images, Web Parts, Extensible Style Language Transformation (XSLT), and other means.
For the remainder of this chapter, when we refer to SharePoint branding, we’re referring to the capabilities available within MOSS with the publishing functionality enabled, otherwise referred to as Web Content Management (WCM). Publishing provides many more options from a branding perspective. Although many of the concepts apply to WSS at a basic level, the examples might be frustrating to users without MOSS.
Benefits of Sharepoint Branding
MOSS provides nearly endless options for customizing the UI. This is an immediate improvement over the previous version for SharePoint, which often wasn’t a viable solution for organizations that required heavily stylized Web sites.
But SharePoint branding isn’t just about making a Web site look good; aside from aesthetics, branding is a key factor in usability. We discussed the importance of an effective taxonomy in the previous chapter. In addition to navigation and search, the UI of the site provides users with another way to locate the content they are seeking. For example, your favorite news Web site probably includes navigation and search, but most of the time you look for the latest stories in the body of the Web page. The same concept relates to the importance of branding.
Branding is a common term used to describe the look and feel of SharePoint, but it might be a little misleading. Branding is really UI design for SharePoint. When a user opens a SharePoint site, everything on the screen works together to create the overall brand. It’s not only the colors and images but also the placement of the objects on the screen. SharePoint branding even helps to style Web Parts. SharePoint branding includes the following major areas:
Consistent look and feel. Master pages and themes help to provide a common set of colors, fonts, and styles that can be applied across all sites.
Content page templates. Page layouts provide templates for the content. Authors can select the page layout that matches the type of content they want to create and fill in the blanks. These templates work in conjunction with the master pages and themes to provide a consistent look and feel.
Editable content. Content can be added into the pages either through Web Parts or field controls. What content is captured and how it’s presented to the user is a branding concept that is often overlooked.
| As the technical team defines the overall branding for your SharePoint site, it’s important to remember that although you can define the framework that authors will use, after authors begin to enter content, there’s only so much you can do from a technical perspective to prevent them from doing things they shouldn’t. Content entered into pages is also a part of SharePoint branding. This is where training and a governance plan can be helpful in ensuring that your brand is carried through from the master page and theme all the way down to content. It’s a good idea to define guidelines for acceptable fonts, images, what browsers will be supported, and what can be changed using what tools. The SharePoint Governance Checklist Guide from Microsoft has several branding related items: http://office.microsoft.com/download/afile.aspx?AssetID=AM102306291033 |
MOSS brings several things to the table from a branding perspective. At the most fundamental level, MOSS provides robust capabilities for publishing traditional Web pages. This is a big departure from the previous version of SharePoint that took a more document-centric approach to content. MOSS still has all of the document management capabilities, but the product is now built on top of the .NET 2.0 framework. This means that anything you could do with a traditional Web site, you can also do with SharePoint. This flexibility also extends to branding within SharePoint.