How SharePoint Can Be Customized

Today we will be taking a quick peek at how SharePoint can be customized to suit your requirements. We will be looking at what the vanilla site looks like compared to a fully customized site. Plain lists vs Lists with a bit of nifty CSS added to give them a bit of life.

Pre-Customization: Vanilla SharePoint Portal

One thing SharePoint lacks when you first open your portal is a bit of life. It's easy enough to change though using the "Change the look & feel" feature, but this doesn't give you a lot of options besides being able to choose the colour schemes of the portal, the font and to add a background. To the left is a screenshot of what SharePoint looks like straight out of the box:

Pro-Customization: Customized SharePoint Portal

This can be a bit tricky as you will need to make sure you know what it is you are doing when it comes to adding CSS to any site. You will need to add the top navigation CSS to the Master Page file, which can be found using SharePoint Designer, if you want the navigation bar to show across all pages within the site. As stated before, playing around with CSS in the Master Page file is not something you want to do if you don't know what you're doing as the consequences can be catastrophic. To the left is a screenshot of our own internal SharePoint portal after customizing it to what we thought was a great fit:

The top menu has its own style, as shown to the left:

Left-hand navigation menu, which is shown below the screenshot to the left:

​All in all, SharePoint can be customized using CSS, Jquery etc. Which in turn brings a bit of life into the site.