"SharePoint 2013 can be branded be the tool of your choice. You can use dreamweaver, blend or whatever you like"
The tool of your choice
It was one of the first thing that I read about this product when it still was in the starting pits, ready to jump out and see the world for the first time. It was really amazing, I thought, as many with me. Finally anyone can brand SharePoint, you don't have to be a CSS wizard or have 5 years of experience with SharePoint to make the product look and feel like how the customer wants it to look and feel like. You can actually use the tool you desire and feel free to design and move around the html, css in whatever manner you like.
Is this true?
Mjaoooo .. in a sense it's true. You can use the tool of your choice in something called Design Manager. (There is a great post about it written by Steve Peschka) It is not straight forward, you will have to do a lot of steps before you can actually work and still there are more than a few bumps on the road ahead. This approach only applies on the Publishing part of SharePoint. If you want to brand MySite, Collaboration or something else that is not part of the Publishing "engine" then you will have to select another approach as this feature is not available for you. So what can you do if you want to have a consistent look and feel through SharePoint ?
The old way is the right way
We could do it the "old" way. Building an own branding package in Visual Studio, deploy it and activate it through a feature. Then it will require full farm access to the SharePoint enviroment. This approach is still not quite valid when developing for Office 365 where you just have this possibility to deploy in certain areas of the enviroment. It is for example quite hard to brand MySite and those kind of areas because you simply don't have access to apply the styles that you want in a way that will have an impact all across the installation. Instead you will have to settle for having a inconsistent design and user experience which will decrease the overall satisfaction of the user and make SharePoint less useful.
You as a interface developer will also have to know Visual Studio and the deployment procedure how to add a solution, use features and so in SharePoint to make the design fly. You can of course have a development process where you as an interface developer just create a mockup of the design and then an ordinary SharePoint developer implement it but these things will never be any good. There will just be tons of custom html markup and there will be inconsistency in the design as the out of the box templates will be left untouched. And we can't keep the customer from using all of SharePoint just because we did not have the knowledge to add the design to all parts?
Consistent design, does it matter?
Ehh .. yes ? Studip to think otherways. I have talked to people who actually thinks that it doesn't matter. Fix the publishing sites and leave the rest to the out of the box SharePoint design. It's too hard and time consuming to do it the other way around. Everyone knows about the importance of consistent navigation, right? The overall look and feel should not deviate, just as the navigation, when you are still in the same context of the application because then the user easily will feel lost and do not find his or hers way with the tasks given to him or her. Consistent design is important for all companies that want their brand to flow like a river through their employees workday in their internal systems AND to spread the company feeling out through all external systems.
Design matters, it is no question about it. The question is - what's the best way to do it in our precious SharePoint 2013?
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A SharePoint fool in front of New York ?[/caption]