Unique visual branding of the company is one of the most important attributes. When you will prepare the intranet portal you will need to care about the branding of the Site.
Office 365 and SharePoint Online sites allow you to manage the key branding elements and follow your company branding policies.
Business case
Your Intranet needs to be beautiful 🙂 This is simple. Users validate the quality of the application or site based on what they can see. Site you will create have to be nice and familiar for the users.
Examples of great SharePoint based Intranet shows that it could be possible to create great-looking intranet without custom code solutions. Moreover, look & feel of such solution could fit into company branding guide.
You can use SharePoint Online technology to build modern, beautiful intranet portal which will work on the computer but also on mobile devices.
Technical Solution
Office 365 branding
Office 365 platform gives you a possibility to change a few elements and style look & feel of the top navigation bar. It is worth to plan the way how you want to manage it.
To set up the branding of the top navigation bar of Office 365 open Admin panel. There choose Settings and Organization profile.
In the new screen choose Manage custom themes for your organization and choose Edit.
In this location, you will be able to change the way how the Office 365 navigation bar is displayed.
You are able to configure:
- logo image
- background image for the bar
Some of organizations use backroung image and putting company logo in the middle of the navigation bar. It could be useful tip if you want to move logo to diffrent location than
Additional available options allow you to:
- prevent users from overriding theme set globally
- set up the color pallet
- turn on user name display
Below you can check results of the above settings.
SharePoint site branding
SharePoint site branding is quite limited, but you have few options that you can quickly configure to make your site look nice.
Hub site branding
From the perspective of the Hub site, you can set the Hub logo and display name. To do that you need to open Hub site settings.
You will be able to set there:
- logo for the Hub site
- display name for the Hub site
SharePoint site branding
You can also configure branding options on the SharePoint site using Change the look settings.
In the Change the look section you will find sections:
- Theme
- Header
- Navigation
- Footer
Theme gives you the possibility to change the color pallet for the site you want to brand. You can choose from 8 available themes or create a new one using Customize option.
Please note that it is possible fully customized color pallet based on Custom Development. To do that you will need to engage Developer to prepare such pallet and to deploy it to the SharePoint site.
Header section offers the possibility to change the look of the SharePoint header bar.
Available options:
- Background color
- Logo for the Header
- The choice between Standard and Compact look (examples below)
Business solution
In summary, you deliver look & feel for your site based on company branding in a few quick steps.
Please remember to consider two challenges related to site branding:
- dedicated color palette for site look require Custom Development
- you should plan how to build branding and graphic identification for the Office 365 (1), hub site (2) and the sites (3).
You also need to remember that Modern SharePoint Sites does not allow CSS and Master page customizations. General layout and site design are fixed. If you plan to highly customize the look & feel of the site you can add additional web parts delivered using SharePoint Framework.
