SharePoint 2010 Branding – Part Two

Where do we begin?

Depending on who you talk to, the first place to begin is planning and this might involve many different factors but the first place would be to start gathering your design requirements, now if you are in a large organisation this may involve marketing, sales comms, IT or existing site users where as if, like me, you were in a small organisation, this might only include a small set of guidelines relating to the corporate colours.

Once you have an idea of what your organisational and user design requirements are you can begin to create a wireframe or mockup of the site focusing only on the layout of the core elements of a SharePoint site.

Balsamiq

There are many websites and pieces of software available which allow you to create mock-ups but by far the best I have used is Balsamiq Mockups this allows you to create mock-ups in minutes that give the organisation a fantastic prototype of how the site will look as far as the layout is concerned and then allows you to build the site with a tangible guide as opposed to working from you memory and imagination.

From these screenshots of the potential new Combined Knowledge site, you can see how the site may look and where the SharePoint elements sit within the site. Having “discovered” this software thanks to Kanwal Khipples session at SharePoint Saturday India I now use this for all my webdesign SharePoint or not.

Now let’s take a look at the Orange site and throw this into Balsamiq and see what we get.

You can see here that we are pretty much spot on to what the final site looks like although in this series we will be focusing on the main elements of the site and not the page layout or main content areas so our site will look more like this

Tomorrow we will begin to get busy with SharePoint Designer

Matthew Hughes

Edit – If you are lucky enough to be going to SharePoint Saturday The Conference then I will be giving away a copy of Balsamiq in my session

About Matthew Hughes

Matthew Hughes has written 56 post in this blog.

I am a SharePoint Developer for UK based Intelligent Decisioning Ltd. Check us out id-live.com I setup SharePoint 365 as I saw that there was a need for introductory blog posts and knew there were some fantastic authors out there who might not have time to run their own blogs and keep them updated reguarly.

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