You might not find SharePoint as attractive as you had hoped on your first encounter. If you are looking to provide a bright and colorful intranet, you need to give SharePoint a more attractive and intuitive user interface.

What is SharePoint Branding?

SharePoint Branding is the process of changing the look and feel of the SharePoint user interface by customizing master pages, style sheets, images, JavaScript, jQuery and so on

Advantages of Branding

• Better content presentation

• Improve navigation

• Improves look and feel

• More browser support

• Enable responsive web design

• Increased user adoption & user friendly

• Hide SharePoint look and feel

Common Branding Requirements

1. Customize the look:

Corporate identity is important, but visuals are more important. There are several reasons to use visuals instead of too much text. In SharePoint Online Modern Sites, click the Cog and choose ‘Change the Look’. From here you can choose from a list of predefined themes. The color pallet can be adjusted and you have the ability to set the background color of the title elements.

• Provide a custom color scheme.

• Display a custom logo.

• Customize the look of the sign-in page.

• Change the look of the navigation controls.

2. Adjust the layout of page:

Before you settle on a design, play with the web-parts and layouts. Microsoft provides a range of web-part and layout options that make it easy to create a visually appealing site. 

• Change the overall layout of information on pages.

• Make the portal "responsive"

• Adding a customized footer.

3. Add more functionality:

Templates define what types of functionality will be readily available in the site and provide a set of pages for you that are already formatted.

• Customize the behavior of the portal navigation.

• Add the custom controls (web parts) on pages.

Common Guidance for SharePoint Branding:

The SharePoint Online service is constantly improving, so updates provisioned to the service may affect the Document Object Model (DOM) structure of out-of-the-box pages and the content of out-of-the-box files for example, master pages. Developers must keep this in mind and should not rely on unsupported customization approaches for example, the position of specific elements in the DOM structure of the page

Updates to the service may affect the structure of out-of-the-box master pages. If you have implemented a custom master page by copying the contents of any out-of-the-box master page, you should monitor if this out-of-the-box master page is not updated, and re-implement these changes in your custom master page. If not, some SharePoint functionality may behave incorrectly when your custom master page is in use. This is why customizing master pages leads to additional risks and maintenance costs, and we recommend that you avoid it when possible.

When planning branding and the structure of your navigation components, it is important to follow the recommendations outlined in Navigation solutions for SharePoint Online portals.

When extending portal functionality via custom controls of web parts, it is important to follow the recommendations in Performance guidance for SharePoint Online portals.