<Disclaimer>This is personal notes of what I retained during the session. This can be incomplete, partially right or wrong. It is just part of the notes I took and what retained my attention. Nothing prevents the user to get more information on their favorite web site.</Disclaimer>

Your success factors, like the number of visitors, page views or conversion rate.

Every body of the SharePoint branding team is around the Business Sponsor, technical people or business oriented people.

The Information Architect defines the content hierarchy of your sites and SharePoint structure. This is the first step of the process.

Then, we go into wireframing by designing one wireframe per page type.

The next step is design comps and is just a picture and it is done usually with an eye of the communication department. From that design, we can build a functional prototype with already some functional navigation. This functional prototype can be reused (95%) for the build phase.

Some tools : Visio 2010 for Information Architecture and Wireframes, Expression Design 4 for the Design Comps and Expression Web 4 for the functional prototype.

Integrating social network is now key and there is already a certain number of plug-ins to integrate Facebook, with Like and Comment for example, provided by Facebook. The generated HTML can then be inserted in the SharePoint web part. The social network integration must be thought early in the design process and not just at the build phase.

Three options to support the mobiles : mobile browser which needs to support different types of screens but it can be problematic if SharePoint is heavily branded; mobile application using the SharePoint APIs, but in order to support the different technologies you have to build different applications and different development tools and languages; finally HTML5, which provides the richness of a mobile application, but support from device to device can vary.

Publishing features provide new master pages, page layouts, some additional web parts, output caching and a lot of interesting things.

Company logo, page header and footer or basically everything that should go on every pages has to go in a master page. The way web parts, page controls, layouts is part of page layouts.

Always start with one of the existing out-of-the-box master page (v4, nightandday, minimal), or go to Codeplex to get one of the starter master page.

Users use more and more search, FAST provides more capabilities like scalability or visual best bets or also the exact count on the refiners.

For external search engines (SEO), the content is key, along with setting meaningful site and page names titles, HTML metadata, don’t use Silverlight or Flash for the navigation to not prevent search engines to follow the links to your content.

Normally, there are two environments : authoring farm on the internal network and production farm available on the web. The can be extended with a staging farm, also on the internal network. This environment should be used to test new content and new features together. When it looks good, then it can be deployed on the production.

To extend the web analytics report provided out-of-the-box by SharePoint : webtrends or intlock with Cardiolog Suite for SharePoint.