When I initially started down the rocky road to learning SharePoint branding, it began with SharePoint 2007. Back then the branding experience, from a designers perspective, was seriously lacking. SharePoint Designer 2007, albeit a forerunner for FrontPage, was somewhat helpful as I embarked on my journey. My first SharePoint branding project was an intranet for a client, and the firm I was working for at the time, gave me free reign on the overall design and layout of the site. When I conducted my research into how to change the look and feel of the site, I felt that customizing an out-of-the-box theme was too limiting. Sure I could have gone into the hive and copied an existing theme folder, and then customized it. However, this strategy didn't meet my requirements. I wanted more control over the design of the master page and page layout. In other words, I wanted to have this site not look like SharePoint at all. 

Branding Overview

Today I am going to give a high level overview of branding SharePoint 2007.  First, I will give a short description of each of the core elements of a SharePoint brand, and then I will briefly outline how to create a consistent brand across a SharePoint website. 

Custom branding SharePoint is an undertaking that will require significant time and resources to plan, design, develop, and implement.  For our purposes, a basic/core SharePoint brand is composed of Master Pages, Layout Pages, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Item Styles, Themes, and Features.  Several factors including the website’s scope, best practices, amount of customization required, and maintainability should be considered when planning how best to design and implement a SharePoint brand.  Below is a brief explanation of each part of a SharePoint brand:

• The Master Page is a container

Recently I worked on a partner project that integrated a third party search engine with Sharepoint (MOSS) 2007.  The most interesting use case in the project was to construct a custom component to replace the search bar in the Sharepoint site page headers.  The component was to be designed to access the third party search engine, which had been configured to crawl the Sharepoint content store.

It's an interesting use case because, in general, Sharepoint is not designed to easily integrate components into the Master Pages that govern the header display.  Sharepoint readily accepts Webpart components into the content areas of the pages, but the Master pages are not Webpart enabled.  Also, there is already a default search bar incorporated into the Master Page header as a ContentPlaceHolder, and it doesn't go away easily.  The project was even more interesting because I used the Microsoft Ajax Toolkit in my custom component.  As you might