Modifying the Look and Feel of a Site

While SharePoint comes with templates that give your site a certain look and feel, many organizations, divisions, or teams may want to customize or change the look and feel of their site to match their own unique requirements or preferences. In this section, you learn some of the alternatives that exist in SharePoint for doing so, including the use of themes and master pages.

Using Themes

You can customize your sites using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which allow you to separate the presentation aspects of a site from your content and HTML. SharePoint takes advantage of style sheets in many ways, one of the most notable being themes. SharePoint themes control the color scheme of a site, things like the background color of a menu item or toolbar. See Figure 8-59 for an example of a site with a Theme applied.

Figure 8-59

Try It Out-Apply a Theme

Themes are used to brand your site to suit a corporate color scheme without the risk of disturbing the layout.

1. Select Site Actions Site Settings.

2. Click the Site Theme link from the Look and Feel section.

3. Select Wheat from the list of available themes.

4. Click the OK button. You will notice a significant color change in your site elements. See Figure 8-60.

   
   Figure 8-60

Tip 

When applying themes to your site, be careful to use only those that enhance or add value to your site, and do not prevent your team members from viewing information. Some themes apply dark background colors and fonts, which can make things difficult for users to view.

How It Works

When you apply a theme to a site, the style sheet associated with the theme overrides the default style sheet and subsequently changes the look and feel of your site. This quick and easy method of customization is a temporary change and applies only until you select a new theme to the site.

Understanding Master Pages

Because SharePoint 2007 is built on ASP.NET 2.0, it takes advantage of the master pages technology. Master Pages allow you to control common elements such as the layout and navigation for an entire site from a single “master” page. The idea is that a single page controls the layout, navigation, and content placeholders. Content pages, which also have content controls that plug content into the placeholders, inherit the look of the master page. Using master pages, you can select a single look and feel template for your site collection at the top level and reset all sites below it to inherit this look and feel. This is a major advantage to companies that go through regular changes to their corporate standard or brand. In earlier versions of SharePoint, a site manager would have to update the look and feel of each site individually, which would be a time-consuming and challenging operation.

When a page is requested via the browser, the content and master pages merge, displaying a single page. Master pages in SharePoint are stored in the Master Pages Gallery you access via the Site Settings page as shown in Figure 8-61.

Figure 8-61

You would customize a master page to create a custom layout for your site. The most common application for customizing master pages is SharePoint Designer. Chapter 13 reviews how you can select a new master page and apply it to your sites and all subsites.

Try It Out-Restore to Site Template

All sites are originally created based on a single set of files, commonly referred to as a site definition. After creating your site, you have the option of customizing your pages and modifying the layout to better suit your needs. In the event you want to revert back to the old look and feel, you can do so using SharePoint 2007 UI.

To reset a page or entire site to its default look and feel, follow these easy steps:

1. Select Site Actions Site Settings.

2. Click the Reset to Site Definition link from the Look and Feel section.

3. You can reset a particular page by specifying the URL, or you can choose to reset all pages within the site to the default look and feel. See Figure 8-62.

   
   Figure 8-62

4. Select the Reset All Pages option.

5. Click the OK button.

How It Works

When you revert a site to its default state, SharePoint makes a snapshot version of your altered master page before the reversion. This means you can later go back to the altered master page.