Know Branding – A “Must Have” for every site

Hmmm, before even getting started with the so called Branding in the SharePoint 2010, lets just get started with a few basic and simple question. Those who already know ASP.NET in prior already understand these, but let me get started from a developer”s point of view and answer these questions 🙂

What is Branding?

In Simple Terms Branding is customizing the a site’s look and feel, like changing the master page layout, applying cascading style sheets(css), adding some javascript to enable client side interaction better etc., The same even applies to SharePoint as well.

Mincrosoft continiously invested in making better tools to make branding better and easier. Some of the tools that could be useful for Customizing the Master Page Layout and CSS for SharePoint are

Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010(Recommended)

Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010

Why Branding?

By default SharePoint2010 makes use of v4.master, CoreV4.css for providing a sample look and feel. 

If SharePoint already ships with a master page and a css, then why do every organization invest in the so called Branding?

The reason is simple, every organization wants to reflect their culture and core values as a part of their sites. To achieve this, designing the custom  master page and its related css is so critical, to reflect their core values.

How can we get started with Branding?

Microsoft SharePoint Designer  2010  is one of the prime tools that can be used to get started with Branding for SharePoint 2010. Its basically a tool that one could rely on to create custom master pages and apply the required styles.

We can also use Visual Studio 2008 /2010 to achieve the same, but it is not customized specifically for designing master pages for SharePoint.

Point to remember 🙂

Creating a custom master page and applying the custom css will not change the look and feel of the existing pages or new pages that will get created. In order to  achieve this the custom master page should be made as default master page.

How to make our custom master page as a Default one using SharePoint Designer?

In SharePoint Designer, Root web ->_catalogs ->masterpages ->Right click on CustomMasterPage and select the option “Set as Default Master Page”. Refresh the home page of the web which displays the custom master page customizations.

From today I will be working on series of posts which will concentrate on customizing each component of master page. Hope you’ll enjoy the complete series.

 

Next: Create Custom Master Page