SharePoint Santa: 5 Branding Improvements I’d Like To See Under My Tree

SharePoint Santa: 5 Branding Improvements I'd Like To See Under My Tree

 Dear SharePoint Santa,

Many people agree that the appearance and user interface of SharePoint need to be augmented and customized in order to meet their marketing and operational requirements.  While this is especially true for Public Facing sites, it’s equally important for many corporate Intranets.   Unfortunately, the common method for Branding SharePoint, (lots of custom CSS) is expensive to implement and typically lost upon migration to the next version.


While branding SharePoint has certainly gotten easier with the last two iterations, there are a few things that Microsoft could improve in SharePoint that would significantly boost sales, increase adoption and advance usability.

In the spirit of the holiday season, I have compiled a short list of Branding Improvements I’d love to see under my SharePoint Christmas tree.

1. Give SharePoint a Fun Interactive Branding Interface.

Someone with basic technical skills should be able to sit in front of a sample SharePoint site and brand the environment by clicking on functional components (Web Parts, Title Bars, Navigation, etc.) and choose from several alternate styles.  Individual elements should then be able to be selected and colored with an eyedropper or color picker.  Your choices, when accepted, could modify the CSS for you. Branding applied this way could be engineered to migrate automatically.

2. Build in Lots of Typical Structure and Layout Options.

SharePoint needs to include 10 to 15 Master/Layout pages that support popular designs for both public facing and Intranet applications.  The same goes for offering multiple styles for drop-down navigation and quick launch. If Microsoft would give us a wide variety of choices we wouldn’t have to create our own.  (And theoretically, if we use Microsoft’s options, they would migrate)

3. Add Examples of Well Formatted Content Editor Web Parts and Summary Link Web Parts.

Branding in the content area of the page would be made easier if the environment provided preformatted examples of common Web Parts.  A dozen well designed (Latin text) samples would speed professional page content presentation.

4. Improve the Image Sizing Control in Web Parts.

Adding options to allow automatic re-scaling of images based on changes in browser width would dramatically enhance the ability to brand page and Web Part content.

5. Make SharePoint Fully 508 Compliant in the top 4 browsers.

If the enhancements listed above were implemented by Microsoft and they were applied through a Microsoft Interface, 508 compliance could be built in.

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that because so many people want an improved SharePoint Branding experience, Santa could cut his shopping in half if he tackled this list first.