Amazing Sharepoint Publishing Sites

Thanks to Joel Oleson and Michael Gannotti for publicizing this today, http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=202. These are amazing Sharepoint WCM sites for top companies. These are jaw dropping and show what a great platform Sharepoint is with great graphics artists banging out killer designs.

While our newly rebranded intranet portal does not look this flashy, I’m hopeful that our upcoming CMS review that it tentatively tabled, will let me promote the possibilities for a forward facing web page for our environment.

The more I’m enveloped in Sharepoint the more I love it!

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Design vs. Brand Loyalty

I had a post sitting in draft mode for a couple days but I hadn’t posted it, obviously. After reading it, it sounded more like a rant and that wasn’t my intent. So instead I’d like to know what people’s opinions are for internal applications in terms of brand consistency.

It seems to me that internal applications and sites should have a looser policy on the company’s brand. Brand consistency is important to the pubic so consumers can easily and routinely identify your product or company. Are internal programs required to follow the same standards?

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s opinions on the matter.

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Base CSS for a Vertical master page modification

So I finally completed a newly branded master page for our internal portal.  After a few mockups prior to our migration to MOSS, this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve done this.  The most frustrating thing about this is the styling that’s used.  Firebug and IE Developer toolbar help nailing these down.  When stylizing this new portal, I chose to override the Vertical and Core styles I did not like.  My base master page I chose to brand off of was the Blue Vertical master page, making a copy of the original course.

For my sanity’s sake, I have created a base CSS template that can be used to get most of the styling done.  It doesn’t include a few custom styles for headers, footer, and custom search controls that I used.  It also does not include the drop shadow styles, as I removed those in the design. Enjoy!

ericsbasecssoverrides

eric

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Left Nav Arrow change

I was branding a publishing site for our intranet portal and thought it would look better if I replaced the black flyout arrow in the Blue Vertical master page.  I wasn’t sure exactly how to do this but I knew it could probably be scripted out.  I had my collegue Tony Miller assist me with this since he’s pretty adept at JQuery.

Using FireBug, I could see the web server call to the image file I wanted to replace, _layouts/images/largearrowright.gif.  I uploaded my file to my custom image location.

We created the following JQuery script to replace the default arrow with my own:

$("img[src='/_layouts/images/largearrowright.gif']").attr('src', 'https://MySPURL/Style%20Library/Images/Branded_Images/largearrowright.png')


From a looks point of view, it didn’t work so I reverted the change until I create a new arrow file.

This was discussed at http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP/topic/left-nav-arrow-replacement-on-a-publishing-site

eric

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