Jul9Written by:SuperUser Account
7/9/2010 10:07 AM 
By Andrew Connell and Randy Drisgill
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 publishing sites make use of the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Features to provide capabilities for creating engaging Web content management (WCM) sites. Frequently used as Internet-facing Web sites, these sites require the use of custom-designed user interfaces to establish an online corporate identity. This process, whether it is used on a traditional HTML page or in Office SharePoint Server, is known as Web site branding. Publishing sites make use of master pages, page layouts, Web Parts, and CSS to enable designers and developers to create branded Web sites that can rival the designs of many popular Web sites today. This article focuses on the mechanics of properly planning and creating a design for an external, Internet Web site by using a publishing site. The article uses as a specific example a fictitious travel company, Adventure Works Travel, which needs to create a heavily branded SharePoint site.
Gathering the Design Requirements
When you want to create a great design for a SharePoint site, it is often a good idea to invest a significant amount of time up front to ensure everything is planned as you need. By properly understanding what the business objectives are before starting to code master pages and page layouts, you can avoid difficult and time-consuming revisions to your design.
This process begins by performing a formal requirements-gathering session. Whether the site you are designing is for 10 users or 100,000 users, you must meet certain requirements before the project is considered a success. The level of detail to which this requirements gathering session should go or "dive" can be tempered by the assumed complexity of the site. Large sites (either large in number of pages or large in number of users) can require more time for gathering requirements than a simple small site. Requirements gathering should always involve key business, marketing, and IT stakeholders to ensure that their ideas are considered and to ensure complete approval on the project. Often this process can be difficult for a branding project. Sometimes it is delegated to the marketing department, or even outsourced to external consultants. Although involving key stakeholders is important, consider that when more people are involved in the decision-making process, both the time needed for gathering requirements and the overall complexity of the project can quickly increase. For this reason, you should carefully determine which members of the team will have relevant input to the requirements-gathering process.
Planning for SharePoint Branding
The process of actually coding branding in a SharePoint site involves several complex steps, such as creating master pages, page layouts, and CSS. This complexity often necessitates an initial planning phase to ensure that you avoid time-consuming rewrites. The planning process for building a SharePoint brand can also include several steps, such as creating black-and-white wireframes, full-color Web site design comps, and even functioning HTML and CSS versions of key pages. The following sections discuss these activities as they relate to creating a branded SharePoint user interface.
For step-by-step instructions, read here. There is also a part 2 to this article that includes the following:
- Building a Custom Master Page
- Creating a Custom Page Layout
- Editing a Page Layout
- Changing the Page Layout of a Page, and
- Packaging and Deploying SharePoint Branding