7 Tips to customize your SharePoint sites beyond the limits | Hubfly

Microsoft is bringing in lots of improvements to SharePoint with every update. It is no more the same old SharePoint you might have seen just a year ago. The improvements to the UI and boatload of features makes SharePoint great.

Now, you can just take SharePoint out of the box and use it as such. It will be good looking. But the level of customization options SharePoint offers is all set to take your Intranet a level ahead.

Branding customizations will be required to match your Intranet to your company’s branding. That is the way to keep your employees even more engaged.

However, when you decide to customize your SharePoint you have to ensure that some essential industry standards are followed. If you don’t follow those best practices you can mess up with your customizations that will be hard to rollback.

But don’t worry we are here to share you some of the best practices while re-designing your SharePoint sites. Come, let us start right away.

Ensure Required Permissions

Before getting started to design your SharePoint site, you should ensure that you have all the required permissions. Without that, you will not be able to make up all the customizations.

Even if you don’t have Admin rights, you should at least have permissions to Add Pages, Customize Pages, Apply Themes & border, Apply Style Sheets etc. So that’s the first thing to set right even before starting your work.

Start With Sharepoint Sites

The easiest way to get started is to start with editing Sites in SharePoint. SharePoint Site is a kind of Intranet website that contains different SharePoint Web Parts like Document Library, Calendar, Task List, etc.

SharePoint sites will have set of web pages to share information / content to the user. SharePoint Site Collection, just as the name implies, is a collection of SharePoint Sites.

You can go to the page editor, and carry out various functions, including moving the position of web parts, changing the color and size of the font and other matters of rearrangement.

Site Settings Is Next

Head on to setting menu and click on Site Settings where you have everything to change the look and feel of your site. You could also change the Logo, Description and modify your site’s title etc.

Change the ‘look n feel’

Themes are great when you need to change the complete look and feel of your site with one click. Microsoft offers a lot of free themes for SharePoint and you can make use of the one that matches your company branding.

This will save a lot of your time in customizations. In case you are not convinced with the default themes, you can develop your own themes.

Start With SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer is a super useful tool for Power Users to begin editing their SharePoint environment. SharePoint designer gives you much more control to fine tune your SharePoint Site — place the logo exactly where you want, place your navigation menu in a new place, or move around the navigation menu.

SharePoint Designer gives you that extra bit of power and you don’t need to be a fully-fledged developer to use it.

Next Level With Visual Studio

If you would like to take your customizations to the next level, all you need to do is to get your feet wet with Visual Studio. If you have any bigger customizations that can be achieved only with your hands on the code, Visual Studio is the best place to go.

With an Integrated Development Environment that is the best place to make those bigger changes.

Trigger Workflows

SharePoint comes with a lot of workflows, but mostly it is under looked. We have often witnessed SharePoint implanted offices go for 3rd party workflow solutions without even knowing the fact that SharePoint has great collection of workflows.

How about adding a Leave Request or raising an Asset Request right from your Digital Workplace dashboard?

We welcome you to try every customization discussed here and completely customize your SharePoint to look unique. Your employees will be more engaged with an Intranet that closely resonates your branding.

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