If you are using Office365, you probably want ‘quick and easy’ wins in order to make your external site look better. At Copper Blue Consulting, we use Office365 for our email, web hosting and our Sharepoint activity. The current blog series will look at some of our findings which we’ve used in order to improve the appearance of our Office365 site.
I know that the Copper Blue site needs some love and attention, and now that SQLBits, SQLRelay and SQLPass is out of the way, I hope that I can start to make our corporate website look, well, corporate.
First thing on the list was to get rid of the theme header logo on the top right hand side. These are automatically added when you select a theme in Sharepoint. If you’ve set up an external website in Sharepoint, then the configuration items are quite clearly laid out in the ribbons. Here is an example here:
We can see that none of the themes are blank, but each has a little picture somewhere. On the Copper Blue site, I just want a plain header with a logo. Nothing more, nothing less. How do we achieve this?
When we open up the Site in Sharepoint Designer, we notice that there are custom images in the Office365 structure. I wasn’t able to delete these. However, I was able to amend the file. Therefore, I navigated to the offending image and clicked on ‘Edit File’. You can see the structure in the following image:
Since I couldn’t delete the image, I decided instead to simply blank it out. Here is the editor for changing the image:
On the right hand side, you can change the brightness. I simply made it pure white, so that it matched the header of the site. I know that this is a ‘fudge’ but it gave me a quick easy win in terms of getting rid of the annoying logo, that didn’t sit with the rest of the branding.
If anyone has other ideas on how to do this, I’d be glad to hear them. In the meantime, more adventures of Office365 will appear as I move the Copper Blue site from being very Sharepoint looking, to something that’s much more customisable. If you want to see the end result, then please do look up the Copper Blue website to have a look!