Brighten Up Your SharePoint Intranet: Discover the Agility of Site Themes!

How custom brand themes can transform your intranet’s visual identity!

I’ve been working on or around SharePoint Intranets for the better part of 20 years and know full well that without thought to style one SharePoint site can very much look like all the others.

The evolution over time to be able to create themes that add a consistent brand or organisation colours helps to stand your factual, authoritative intranet content from other internal opinion and collaboration material.

Colours matter!

Organisation colours (brand) are more than just a visual element; they are a fundamental part of your organisation’s identity. When applied consistently, they can:

• Enhance Recognition: Consistent use of brand colours across all platforms, including your SharePoint intranet, reinforces your brand identity.

• Build Trust: A cohesive visual identity helps build trust with your audience. When your intranet reflects your brand accurately, it signals professionalism and reliability.

• Boost Morale: Employees feel a stronger connection to the organisation when the intranet embodies the organisation’s look and feel.

Applying Brand Colours Using Themes

SharePoint Themes offer a straightforward way to apply your brand colours across your intranet sites. When a new site is created a site owner can hop into Settings, Change the look and select a new theme. All of the site associated colours are updated to the new style.

While applying the new theme is easy the creation of the theme in the first place has not been so straightforward. Probably involving a PowerShell and definitely engaging with your IT team. While the currently evolving SharePoint Brand Center will no doubt make this easier, it’s still not quite there yet.

Special cases

The scenario that I really wanted to focus on in this blog was those one-off cases. The time that an intranet site needs it’s own identity maybe a subtle play on the organisation brand or completely different.

Previously communicators have been a little trapped, create a whole new theme and risk that it spreads to other sites uncontrolled or use the existing theme and make the best with images and assets.

Well all that has changed! Site owners can now create a brand theme just for their site, easily within SharePoint.

How to do it

Remember you'll need to be a Site Owner for this bit!

Open Settings

Select Site Branding: find it under the Change the look option

Customise Your Theme : You can choose your primary, background, and accent colours to create a bespoke theme. (You’ll need the HEX codes for your colours)

Check your theme: during creation your colours are checked for accessibility

Then go back to Change the look and Themes to find your site theme to apply

Conclusion

I really like this new feature, I feel it brings a new level of agility and flexibility to communicators using a SharePoint Intranet. But - always engage your organisations' brand experts and intranet steering before you go rogue!

It’s clearly not a scalable solution for branding, so you’ll still be working with IT to create your organisation wide themes for your intrant, but for one-offs it’s great.

Examples where you might use this:

• Charity initiative in charity’s own brand colours

• Employee forums with a differing colouring to show independence

• If you organisation has an external customer brand you want to showcase

This feature combined with other new look and feel features like section background images really helps make SharePoint an even greater intranet platform out-of-the-box.

Matthew 

Matthew Burrell  is a consultant at Your 365 Coach

Footnote: Since I wrote this, I've also spotted a new option to copy a theme from one site to another. - Still not really an 'at scale' solution for an organisation but a time saver. Starts to raise a worry about shadow intranets and brand creep but that's a consideration for your intranet governance. Keep an eye on the M365 Roadmap. (Feature ID: 375500)

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