Snam is a huge italian company dealing with extracting, moving and selling gas.
While working for XYZ Reply i’ve been developing some templates for the client’s intranet.
Reply’s objective was to reorganize user experience, produce a new graphic interface along with the templates.

Applying templates to sharepoint is somelse’s matter, but as a interface developer i had to reorganize some html files.
I ve stated with a top-down approach. i ‘ve designed the templates, and then made some reworking, expecially for some widgets sharepoint comes with (e.g. menus).
But I’m still wondering if styling a sharepoint templates from the ground isn’t a better way instead passing through some “mise au point”.

The major problem:

• sharepoint uses a lot of classes, so you have to reuse the same class name just to have some impact on the design
• moreover, sharpoint produces a code that is’nt semantically valid: a lot of html elements (and tags) are used for layout purpose.


• Forget table-less unless you want to rebuild a template form scratch: shrepoint templates are based on old, plain tr-td stuff, but this can be an advantage if the working team doesn’t know any css stuff.
• any “content box” can be placed anywhere in the page, so you have to design your html in a modular way, where every bit on content is a reusable block inheriting some properties from the position where it’s placed
• for the same reason above, forget to use fixed width on most elements
• be careful to include in the design any css that resets the default properties applied to any tag...it even reset the css properties applied to any sharepoint base widget