Customer Reviews

Professional SharePoint 2007 Design (Wrox Professional Guides)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

One of the most common demands I see from customers is "I don't want my site to look like SharePoint." Unfortunately there aren't many books on this subject. This book does a great job of introducing the reader into what's involved in creating and applying a brand in a SharePoint site. It even includes intro chapters for those who haven't done this before or who are new to using tools like Photoshop. Finally there's a resource to point people to!

I was given a copy of this book by one of the authors themselves. I have read through a few of the chapters so far and it has helped me tremendously with understanding how the design process works related to SharePoint projects. The book begins by describing some of the basics of web design theory and creation and then transitions into actually making these designs a reality in SharePoint. The author's dive into all of the important topics related to SharePoint design such as creating design comps that are tailored to SharePoint, converting them to master pages and themes with custom CSS, creating page layouts, working with navigation and working with web parts. I think the book would be good for designers trying to work with SharePoint as well as non-designers that need to understand the process and techniques behind creating a custom SharePoint UI.

This book was great for me because I work as my companys only SharePoint designer, but I'm really a developer. The book style is conversational so if you are hoping to jump around alot in the book you may have a hard time. I chose instead to read straight through and following all of the examples it took me about three days. This book does a good job of walking through prototyping a site in PhotoShop especially for people who don't use it that often.

The book focuses on Internet facing sites and though it does refer to the differences in Intranet sites I often wanted more information than was provided.

This was a very helpful book.

Often it is difficult to know what a recommended approach is or even what is possible in the world of SharePoint site design and branding.

The authors provide practical advice from their in-depth experience in dealing with SharePoint. Each chapter takes you through a particular area, showing you how to navigate around the technological issues.

I did find myself wishing they had better separated the exercises from the topical discussion a bit more.

Highly recommended.

For those who will be rebranding a site and all that it entails - this is an invaluable resource. From master pages, layout pages, using CSS, navigation, etc., it's all here. If you are a developer who finds yourself having to perform these tasks then get this book! Nicely done.

I am a web designer tasked with learning Sharepoint to redesign my company's intranet. Learning how to brand and customize Sharepoint is no easy task. I took Heather Solomon's Branding class and have benefited greatly from the take-home documentation that she created. I was hoping this book would take the knowledge I already had and take it to the next level. I am not sure who this book is aimed for, but I doubt it was designers. There are whole chapters in here on basic design principles and how to use Photoshop. What? Anyone who calls themselves a designer better know that stuff already, imho. Those chapters alone leave me to think that programmers and techies were the intended audience, not professional web designers. The descriptions for how to handle tasks are cryptic and the associated screenshots are not in the layout with the text, they are often several pages over. As a mainly visual learner, as most designers are, this makes the book a massive pain to use. I haven't read every chapter yet, but as of right now, I am disappointed. If you really need to learn how to brand and customize Sharepoint, go to Heather's class and search the web for other folks who are having branding adventures-even little old me has a Sharepoint branding blog-we tend to share what we know pretty freely ;)

I have been doing web design for the past 5 years, so I was no stranger to creating a website. I was, however, brand new to SharePoint design. I received a project at work where I needed to create a SharePoint site that "doesn't look like SharePoint". After some research I decided to purchase this book.

I am glad that I got this book. There is a lot of information in this book, and a lot of it was unnecessary for me, but I would imagine it would be helpful to people who are new to web design. There is a chapter about creating a design in Adobe Photoshop and a chapter for turning that design into a website, so you could be a complete beginner and use this book. There are also chapters on creating a theme, masterpage, and various other chapters about SharePoint in general. The thing that you have to keep in mind when reading this book is that it jumps around, A LOT. If you're looking for something that is going to be step by step how to create a SharePoint site, this might not be the book for you. Yes it does go step by step, but it jumps around so much that is hard to take it step by step. They will go through step by step how to do something, and then they will go on for a chapter about something that you don't really want to read about, then back to step by step. I read this entire book before I was able to pinpoint exactly where the information I needed was. For me that was the chapter on masterpages, and that was really the only chapter that I needed to read for what I was doing.

Now, there are a few things that I really liked about this book. It was an easy read, for the most part what they say is straight to the point and makes sense. Another thing that I really liked about this book is the free code you can download from <...>. There is one page specifically that I used, which is a base masterpage. I was able to use this and put my custom html tags around it, and it worked perfect and quickly.

Overall I am very happy with this book. I was able to create the site that I needed and with only one book. Can't go wrong with that.

The two opening chapters set the tone for the book and unfortunately it was not good. The first chapter was filler and did not add any value. The second chapter had some good discussion on topology and taxonomy, but it barely scratched the surface of design. The rest of the book has some in-depth chapters on Sharepoint design features, but it is apparent that four authors wrote this book and the editing process did not smooth out the transitions. I believe you can get most of this information off of MSDN and Technet.

This is a great book for those that want to do design the right way.