by TL Ferrell
SharePoint provides many tools for providing navigation
throughout a site collection. Typically, the Top Link Bar near the top of each content page provides links to
subsites, and this can be set to persist down through the hierarchy. (This bar
is referred to as Global Navigation
in SharePoint Standard and Enterprise.) The Quick Launch Bar on the left (called Current Navigation in Standard and Enterprise) typically provides
links to lists, libraries, and other content within the subsite.
A Tree View is
also available in addition or instead of the Quick Launch Bar. Finally, links may be placed manually on the Top Link Bar or Quick Launch Bar, or may be placed anywhere on a page via a Links
list.
In addition, SharePoint provides navigational aids through
the Browse menu and the breadcrumb navigation path found on
every page.
These tools can help you understand where you are in a
hierarchy. However, the Top Link Bar
on a subsite might not inherit from the parent site, and in that case the breadcrumb and Browse menu won’t provide a complete drill-down trail. In addition,
in large site collections it can be easy to get lost in the hierarchy when you
start clicking around.
One technique that can help users stay oriented is to use
site colors as visual cues. While we teach look and feel customization in our
courses Introduction to SharePoint 2010 – Using SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Introduction to SharePoint 2010 - Using SharePoint Server 2010, this post will show
how these features can be used not just for their own sake or general branding
purposes, but to enhance the user experience.
In SharePoint Foundation, you are limited to the built-in
themes for color (and font) schemes; SharePoint Standard and Enterprise allow
customization of themes on an element-by-element basis. Of course, in any of
these editions, custom themes or CSS code can be developed to accomplish even
greater customizations.
In the site collection example, there is one top-level site
and six subsites; many of the subsites have additional subsites, some for
several levels. The goal is to make each branch of the hierarchy visually
distinct, to help users understand when they are in the HR branch versus the
Marketing branch, for example. Users rarely start at the top level and drill
down. So, this technique may be especially helpful when users follow a link
posted somewhere or sent to them in email, or even when using a bookmark
they’ve made.
The first two examples below use only the built-in
browser-based tools to apply strongly contrasting schemes.
The first option, available to all editions of SharePoint,
is to simply choose a different Theme
for each branch. The top-level site of this site collection retains the Default
theme. The Administration branch also retains that theme.
Here’s an example of what the other branches might look like
after applying different built-in themes.
The problem, though, with using the different out-of-the-box
themes is that the site collection gets a higgledy-piggeldy look, with no
unifying look and feel. In addition, the site collection may have more branches
than can comfortably be differentiated by themes, given that some themes may
not be suitable for a number of reasons. Also, themes include font choices, and
it may not be desirable to have different fonts in various areas of the site
collection. Environments which have SharePoint Foundation only may need to turn
to custom solutions in those cases. Environments with SharePoint Standard or
Enterprise have another option.
By applying one of the built-in themes throughout the site
collection, and then tweaking the dominant colors for each branch, it is easy
to create unique, but unified looks for the entire site collection. Once a
color palette has been chosen (or borrowed from one of the many color scheme
sites on the Internet), it’s a simple matter to change the individual color
elements that make up a theme to create a custom theme. To make the examples
below, I started with the SharePoint Default theme. (For step-by-step
directions for this process, stay tuned for a future blog post in the SharePoint
Solutions Help Community Blog.)
(Note that these color schemes are not meant to be examples
of excellent web design, but just to illustrate the point of visually
differentiating branches of the site collection.)
Many of these subsites have subsites themselves, and the
custom scheme for that subsite is inherited throughout the hierarchy. So, the
color scheme for the entire site collection looks something like this:
On corporate web sites, the color schemes might already be mandated
and set up for the entire site collection (or site collections), but even then
there may be room for variation that can help users. In the case of a site
which adheres to corporate branding standards, such customization would be
simple to tweak to provide the types of variations that would provide visual
cues. For example, if the dominant corporate color is dark green with accent
colors of gold and black, different combinations of those three colors,
including shades and tints based on those colors, could be used as dominant and
accent colors.
Another option is to simply change the site icon in the
upper left corner. Again, there may be corporate standards regarding the logo,
but usually certain variations can be allowed or developed. In our example, a
simple two-color line drawing is an accepted variant of the logo. Using the
same color schemes described above, alternate versions of the logo can be
created and used to replace the default SharePoint icon at the top of each page
while retaining a single theme throughout the site collection.
