SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 7. Applying Templates, Page Layouts, and Themes

Introduction

It's said that "appearances can be deceiving," yet so many things in people's lives seem centered on appearances. Even a casual viewing of television commercials or magazine ads reveals a great concern about hairstyles, clothing, makeup, and oral hygiene. Translating that to the World Wide Web, some of the things people look for in a web site are how it displays and how it functions. The discipline of Web Usability exists to test web sites and determine how to make them better and easier to use by their target audience.

You want everything about your business to be professional and attractive to customers. This includes your external web presence, intranet, extranet, and any other HTML-based interface to your company. MOSS 2007 contains various tools that affect the general layout, style, and color of your site collection and its content in order to achieve this goal. In general, the elements you will be modifying to establish the "look and feel" of your site collection are site templates, page layouts, and themes:

Site templates

These let you provide a consistent and professional appearance for your site collection including the Portal Site. This includes the general layout and structure of sites and eliminates the need to create sites and subsites from scratch.

Page layouts

This element governs what type of site content is displayed and the location and function of fields on the page.

Themes

Themes are a collection of ...