Branding and Customizing SharePoint 2007

I have been delving into the black art of SharePoint Branding, and I have been finding it a grueling process. Don’t get me wrong it is a vast improvement over SharePoint 2003 and I have already built 2 Features (but not for public consumption yet).

SharePoint 2007 uses a combination of CSS and master pages to allow the developer to make most of the changes that are required for branding, but it is still just so hard… I am no CSS or html expert so I am relearning skills I have not really used for about 4 years. The last web project I worked on I had the luxury and the privilege to work again with my friend Greg Fyans, who is the BEST CSS, Accessibility and HTML guru I have ever seen.

SharePoint is predominantly built using tables. Why, I don’t know, in this world of CSS, but it is.

MSDN has a three part article on “ Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites ” which is very informative, but which still lacks lead through. By that I mean that you select and load brands that already exist on the server and only add a single (ish) line of HTML to show how to customize it. This is not quite enough for me, but the articles are very usefully anyway.

XFN:

P.S. Although Greg Fyans CSS and HTML skills are beyond guru(Savant I think) his DotNetNuke skills are still being honed: I look forward to seeing his site up again.

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