Non-Destructive SharePoint Branding

Non-Desructive SharePoint Branding

Branding has always been a fun topic for me, this is especially so when it comes to Branding SharePoint.  I have a pretty varied background, but the time I spent in corporate operations gives me a tremendous appreciation for what SharePoint can do in the right hands. You can make miracles every day.

Fixated On Looks

However, many of the senior and mid-level managers that make key decisions regarding their SharePoint deployment don’t really know what SharePoint can do. Because of this, they often focus on what they’re comfortable with, and since they’re familiar with websites, they fixate on what it looks like.

Sophisticated Code Iceberg

With its website-like appearance, many of them assume you can just modify its “look and feel” as if it were a simple website instead of the exposed tip of  an iceberg of sophisticated-code-designed-to-perform-specific-operations.

This leads to some bizarre requests, in the name of “Branding,” that out of ignorance, damages or removes access to key functionality.

As a digital agency that considers SharePoint branding to be a core competency, we often find ourselves in a situation where clients will ask us to do things that will significantly interfere with the functionality of SharePoint.

This can create some interesting conversations.  I imagine that it’s similar to trying to explain to a new Ferrari owner, who has never driven a car, that sanding over that rounded rectangle on the back of the car and painting it to match the fender, isn’t such a good idea because it’s the gas cap and they’re going to need it.

While it’s true that with the skillful use of master pages, layout pages, and CSS you can control the appearance of SharePoint down to the pixel level,  there are things that shouldn’t be done.  To prevent this you’ll often have to blend education about how SharePoint operates into your branding discussions.

SharePoint Migration for the Future

One of the topics that really needs to be emphasized is future SharePoint migration.

Typically, when you migrate your SharePoint environment to the next version of SharePoint, your site collections will arrive with pages that will be governed by the new environments default master page.  This will immediately display the “true” SharePoint environment without the benefit of your CSS, master pages, layout pages and probably scripts.

If your branding has been so extreme that when stripped of the “improvements to its appearance,” it can no longer be operated by your intranet users, you have a serious problem on your hands.  If your migration has utilized a development environment, a test environment in a production environment, you have probably had weeks or even months to prepare for this. If not, then you’re going to have a very busy time rewriting a whole bunch of CSS, at the very least.

As a company that loves doing sophisticated branding for SharePoint, this might seem like heresy,  but it is quite easy to give SharePoint very sophisticated branding with an absolute minimum of custom code that will be stripped away upon migration.

Use Lots Of Embedded Graphics

• Start with a SharePoint Theme and modify it to reinforce your corporate logo color set
  • You can easily build on top of that with a myriad of  graphics sprinkled into:
    • Image Viewer Web Parts
    • Announcement Web Parts
    • Calendar Event Web Parts
    • Summary Link Web Parts
    • Content Editor Web Parts

We’re not just talking about a few pictures on a page here.  We’re talking about creating sophisticated page layouts by using lots of short and wide graphical banners placed in Web parts with their title bars turned off.

Don’t think that this takes any less time than writing a bunch of CSS, it doesn’t.  In fact sometimes selecting the right image takes much, much longer than addressing the equivalent issue using CSS.

Advantage: Migration

Our experience with a few 2010 Sites Branded this way is that it migrates amazingly well.  Requiring just a few minutes to re-create the effect of the theme that was stripped off.

I do think that this approach is rather extreme.  The best branding comes from a mixture of code, images and imaginative layout.

I just wanted to advance the idea that the best branding for SharePoint respects the product itself, its capabilities and the fact that it will need to migrate.

At the end of the day, diplomacy is the biggest part of branding.