One of the most common things I’m asked when talking about SharePoint branding topics is about whether you can make SharePoint look as good as a typical website.  And my response is always “yes, of course you can.”  People normally are happy with the answer and move on to something else, but I’ve always gotten the feeling that everyone felt that I might be looking at the world with SharePoint colored glasses.  The proof is in the pudding though….

The University Of Pennsylvania School Of Nursing came to us a few months back and was in the final stages of implementing their public facing MOSS site.  Their goal was to replace their existing site with a new site running in MOSS to take advantage of all of the WCM functionality.  Their existing site already had a great design that they wanted to keep.  I worked with uber SharePoint branding ninja Randy “The Mossman” Drisgill worked with Eric Stern from U Penn to make sure this project launched in time for the start of the new semester.  Eric and his team had already done some early work with the design but there were still some questions about how to recreate some of the existing functionality in SharePoint.  And to top it all off we had about 3 weeks.  Randy worked his usual magic creating several master pages, layouts, CSS, and did some custom XSLT for some content query web parts.  I worked on creating an information architecture that would display all of their current content in an intuitive SharePointy way.  And Eric, honestly I’m not sure exactly what he did but the guy busted his tail and made sure all the content looked like it was supposed to.  If he ever decides to visit Orlando we owe him a frosty beverage of his choosing.

Here’s a look at the original non-SharePoint site:

Here’s the MOSS version of the site:

Looks pretty similar doesn’t it?  I bet some of you think we just Photoshopped that pic – for those of you doubters here’s a look at that page in edit mode: