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SharePoint 2013 branding: Using the Design Manager, or going old school




May 7, 2013 —  (Page 2 of 4)
But should you decide to stay the course and do your branding like you have always done, one change I recommend you make is embracing mapping your master page gallery to a network drive and working from there instead of using SharePoint Designer like you may be used to. By enabling the Design Manager on a site collection, you open up the ability to map a network drive to the master page gallery. From here you can upload files and edit your master pages, page layouts and style sheets with the text editor of your choice instead of being limited to the text editor in SharePoint Designer. Also, keeping all your branding assets in the master page gallery instead of spread out between the master page gallery and the style library is a much cleaner approach.

The one “gotcha” is that, when just using a starter master page that is not associated with an HTML file like with the Design Manager, you will not be able to use Adobe Dreamweaver to work with your master pages.

Using the Design Manager
The Design Manager most definitely addressed the issue it was trying to fix; that is, not everyone is comfortable creating SharePoint brands from a starter master page. Designers that come from a more traditional Web-design background often get frustrated that SharePoint doesn’t behave like other content management systems, and some may not be aware of things like content placeholders that are required in a master page for SharePoint to function.

The Design Manager opens the door for more designers that aren’t as familiar with SharePoint to still be able to create SharePoint brands. The idea is you can create a mockup of your site in standard HTML and CSS and then upload the mockup to the Design Manager. At this point, the Design Manager will take the mockup and create a fully functional master page using your design.

Once finished, you have a master page that SharePoint uses but also an HTML file that is associated with the master page that you use to make edits to the site. You never have to even open up the master page file, and better yet, you can use programs like Adobe Dreamweaver to edit the associated HTML file. When you make an edit to the HTML file, SharePoint will automatically sync that same change to the SharePoint master page.


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