Title : Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design

Author : Randy Drisgill, John Ross, Jacob J. Stanford, Paul Stubbs, Larry Riemann

Summary :
Almost end of last year, I started a SharePoint 2010 web site project and I was wondering if there was interesting resources about SharePoint 2010 branding. I had already some experience on both SharePoint 2007 and 2010 branding, but it is always good to see if one follows the correct way when implementing a public-faced site. At that time, my main source of information was the blog and the site of Andrew Connell, then I found this book, “Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design???. Excellent coincidence as my primary focus at the SharePoint Conference 2011 (#SPC11) was branding and the authors (Randy Drisgill and John Ross) of this book had several sessions on the topic; sessions that were of a great quality.

This book starts with the basics, explaining the different types of branding, before giving an overview of the Cascading Style Sheets. Even if they use the word “overview???, the level of details is already good enough to start a good work. Then, Master Pages, Page Layouts and web parts are each of them explained in detail. Here, I would never enough recommend to use the Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010 as they are a great accelerators when starting a layout. The fourth part ends with the branding deployment. The last part focuses on the ribbon, the Client Object Model, jQuery and Silverlight.

Book Review :
Let’s be short, this book is a must-have for all the people that want to start branding SharePoint 2010. The way the authors explain how the different part of SharePoint take place in the graphical design is very well explained. There are a lot of examples and code samples. The code presented is not too long to be followed when reading the book, meaning that you don’t absolutely have to download the samples to understand, which I appreciate a lot. Moreover, the examples the reader goes through in the book make sense and we could imagine that the Randy’s Waffles site is a real project (by the way, have a look at the SYRP/BACN site, used during the SPC11 conference’s sessions).

Finally, even if the book’s primary focus is the publishing functionality of SharePoint, most of what it contains can also be applied to non-publishing sites.

And, yes, again, in my opinion, this book was missing in the SharePoint 2010 book offering.