If you have been involved in branding a SharePoint 2007 site with a custom skin, then you know how important it is to understand SharePoint’s underlying CSS structure.

 

I ran across this post at Heather Solomon’s blog:

 

She has a done a great job of explaining each CSS class defined in SharePoint’s core CSS files. What I like best is that she posted screenshots of the GUI elements that affected by each CSS class.

 

We recently completed a project where, among building some great web parts, we branded a SharePoint site. Not only did we a create master page design for the Content Pages (the pages intended for site visitors to see), we also applied a branded master page to the Application Pages. This isn’t easy as the application pages are any page that reside in a SharePoint sites _Layouts folder. For some reason, the SharePoint team didn’t think these pages would need to be skinned as SharePoint does not support this scenario out of the box.  We found a work around at Graphical Wonder:

 

 

The discussion on Shane Perran’s site of application.master pages is very informative and is a must read for anyone looking to buils a branded site on SharePoint.