Putting Your Mark On It

11. February 2010 by Vince.

There are a few ways to brand your SharePoint site so that it has the look and feel that is right for your company.  You can use the web interface to change themes and styles or use SharePoint designer to edit layouts and master pages.  However, these methods only give you one-off modifications to a specific site collection, and don’t allow you to migrate your design across multiple sites or SharePoint installations.

What I need to accomplish:

• brand my SharePoint site, including master pages, layout pages, stylesheets, and images
• apply the same branding to 3 environments: dev, staging, and production

The best way to do this is to use Visual Studio to create a Solution Package with all of the branding elements included.  This way we can simply deploy the solution onto all of the different environments to have a uniform look and feel without having to do the work multiple times.

This article in msdn describes in great detail the steps for creating the solution and deploying it, by having the administrator activate the branding feature on the site.

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