Branding in SharePoint

Microsoft has a pretty good article (actually part of a series) on branding in SharePoint. It's not as user-friendly as I would have liked, but it does thorougly step through how to change various default page elements.

One other interesting tidbit, is that I had always heard that Frontpage is the premier HTML editor to use for designers, as hinted at in these bullet points from Microsoft:

• Full Web Part management, including adding, removing, deleting, and moving.
• Wizard-based development of dynamic data based on the Data View Web Part and connected Web Parts that use data from a variety of sources.
• Look and feel page customization, including styles and layout.

All pretty cool to be sure. But Microsoft also offers this important warning:

Using FrontPage to modify SharePoint pages is relatively simple, but may have some impact on ongoing supportability of the portal site. Pages you customize in FrontPage cannot be replicated across a portal site or enable a single maintenance point because the page, after it is customized, is handled differently from pages that are based on the template (described in the following section).

For this reason, FrontPage is a great customization tool for team sites, but you should restrict its use in customizing enterprise portal sites. We strongly recommend that you customize SharePoint templates when branding portal site pages, which keeps the SharePoint page from being customized, or ghosted, and enables global changes to a portal site's look and feel.