There are many blogs out there covering the topic of branding a site using master pages, CSS, and themes. My task is to brand our corporate extranet site for our business partners. The nice part is I already have a style guide to follow that was created as part of our customer-facing site. The not so nice part is I was having a fair amount of trouble making SharePoint look like that site. After trudging through many blog posts and articles online I think I’ve found the method that will work. Here goes…
Heather Solomon’s postings were invaluable in figuring out how to do this. If you’re just beginning to brand your site, read her blog for both background and excellent tips. In my case, I began with her base master page which is essentially a stripped-down master page containing only the necessary controls to make the page run on SharePoint. I set my site to use that master page in the Site Actions|Site Settings|Modify All Site Settings|Look and Feel|Master Page. I then created an empty CSS file and loaded that in my site style library and selected it as an alternate CSS file on the same settings page as above. That worked great for some things but, in particular, the main navigation bar still wouldn’t use my styles. It appeared that some inline styles were being added to that control at run time which were overriding my custom styles. In order to get my styles to be used, I ended up having to update the controls in the master page to use my custom styles instead of the canned ms-(*) styles. That seems to have done the trick. More to come as we progress…
Filed under: SharePoint 2007
