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When we're talking about branding in Microsoft SharePoint there are several options. You've probably heard about site definitions, site templates, themes, master pages, page layouts, CSS, and so on. In this article we'll tear apart each of these options and discuss what you'll want to use to modify the appearance of your pages.

SharePoint Designer

The starting point for most discussions about branding is SharePoint Designer. SharePoint Designer is the preeminent editor for SharePoint and can handle editing the master page, page layouts, and pages themselves. The master pages, ASP.NET Master Pages to be more specific are the master layout for the page. The content from a page layout which is used in web content management, or a page drops into placeholders in the master page. Page layouts further contain content from the items they're associated with but otherwise are edited the same way that regular pages are.

Certainly that's not a bad capabilities list. There are some pages that SharePoint Designer can't modify. It can't modify any of the "application" pages. Those are the pages that exist in the _layouts directory. This can be an issue because some of the pages that users see -- such as upload file, and view all site content, come from this directory.

SharePoint Designer is also a great editor for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) both from the context of editing your own CSS sheets in a site as well as for editing the CSS sheets that are essential to themes.

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The challenge with SharePoint Designer is that the changes apply only to the site collection, site, and page that SharePoint Designer is editing. That's great if you just need to customize the look of one site -- but what if you need the look and feel to apply to multiple sites?

(If you want to learn more about how and when to use SharePoint Designer see: When You Need SharePoint Designer)

Site Template

The first option for getting the SharePoint Designer changes beyond the current site is to take the site you've modified with SharePoint designer and save it as a template. Then when you need a new site you create it from the site template you've created. This approach works but it means that you either have to create a new site template for each of the built in site definitions -- or you have to live with just the one site template that you've created. It also means that you can't go back and apply the changes after they've been created.

Finally, to add insult to injury, if you ever change the work that you did on the original site those changes won't be reflected across the other SharePoint sites that were created from the template because each page exists separately in the database. So site templates solve the problem of getting SharePoint Designer changes into multiple sites but without the ability to adapt to changes in the future.

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