Creating a visually appealing SharePoint site is vital if you want people to engage with it regularly. But you don’t need to spend hours designing and curating your sites for them to look good.
We’ve created a video to show you that it’s possible to create a professional and captivating SharePoint site in under 20 minutes. By sticking to our top tips, you can make sure your organisation’s SharePoint sites look clean and well-designed while remaining practical and informative.
Get inspired by the SharePoint look book.
Microsoft has put together a free resource filled with inspiration for SharePoint sites, whether you need pages for news, announcements, resources or training.
The beauty of the look book is that if you see a site you like, you can add it to your SharePoint as a starting point.
Use high-quality images.
Inject life into your SharePoint site by using eye-catching imagery.
There are plenty of free and high-quality image resources out there, so you don’t necessarily need to spend money on bringing a photographer in to take team photos.
The SharePoint look book is a great place to download professional photos, and SharePoint itself has an image library filled with all types of pictures to suit your needs.
By filling your site engaging imagery, you’re already halfway there to making it look good.
Stick to a colour scheme.
Once you start playing with colour in SharePoint, you can truly make a site your own. Use your brand colours and stick to a simple colour palette of around 2-4 shades to keep everything looking consistent and professional.
You could go one step further and bear this colour scheme in mind when selecting images for the site.
Section variety.
When you have lots of content to showcase, important messages can easily get lost in the noise.
Make sure you break up your content into logical sections and ensure these sections look distinctive from each other.
Again, use colours to differentiate each section. As Tony shows in the video demonstration, you can make some areas pop with a brighter hue, followed by a simple muted tone for the next section.
Be sure to use different layouts for each section and mix it up with your column numbers and sizes.
Think about spacing.
Avoid cramming your pages full of content and instead separate out elements with spacers. A bonus tip to ensure your spacing is consistent throughout is to stick to a specific spacer size, for example, 20 pixels.
Toggle Between Published and Edit Mode.
When editing a SharePoint site, it’s easy to get fixated on how it looks in Edit mode rather than what it will look like when finally published.
Switch between Published and Edit mode to give yourself a chance to step back and look at it through the eyes of your users.
Engaging content.
It’s all well and good creating an attractive SharePoint site, but you also need to ensure the content is relevant, engaging and adding value to your end-users if you want them to use the site consistently.
Think creatively and don’t be afraid to add some fun, light-hearted content in there.
As you can see from our demo video, Tony uses a Word of the Day web part and also a short message from the CEO. It’s about finding the balance between this type of content and your more serious stuff, like policies and company updates.
Additionally, make sure your SharePoint site isn’t static is by adding the News web part that links in and pulls content from your company news pages so your readers will always have the latest articles and updates at their fingertips.
If you have any questions about creating SharePoint sites for your organisation, please get in touch with a member of our team right now.
