Whether you’re building a public site using SharePoint Foundation, on a cloud hosted environment or using a dedicated environment with SharePoint Enterprise edition, there are few things to be aware of and pay attention to in order to ensure the success of your project and avoid pitfalls.
KEEP THE BRANDING FRESH
This philosophy applies to new sites and existing designs to be ported over to SharePoint as a new platform. The branding of your site will represent what your company is all about online. So, freshen up your site with few new ideas to keep it up to date. SharePoint, as a platform, should not dictate your design approach. You can do just about anything you want from a UI development standpoint on this platform, so think BIG! Always keep your brand’s identity at the forefront of your design efforts and get inspired. You want any design to be updated, fresh and interesting for your users.
BE MOBILE FRIENDLY
Remember about mobile devices, and not just phones, tablets too, and not just that one tablet. If you’re going to be supporting mobile devices, make sure you support at least few current models. Most of the new mobile devices have browsers capable of running HTML5, and if they don’t they will very soon; so this is not a lot of work.
Use a masterpage which is HTML5 compatible, like this one here from Kyle Schaeffer: Kyle Schaeffer Responsive HTML5 Master Page. It’ll render the masterpage differently based on the screen resolution etc. Think about which approach makes the most sense for you, your users, and your budget. And think long-term! You’ll want to develop a mobile solution that won’t require a total redesign or reengineering 6 months or 1 year down the line. If a mobile version of your site makes sense, don’t totally abandon adaptive and responsive design techniques in your desktop design because that may come back to bite you later. Be sure to anticipate these requirements as part of your design strategy and scope.
REALLY THINK ABOUT YOUR SITE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Now I know that you’re probably yawning there … who needs information architecture, right? And I’m sure for a large corporate site you’re doing all the due diligence to get it right, right? For small, simple sites, at least decide what main sections are you going to have on your site: About Us, Clients, Products?
The reason why you want to think about IA, is so that you can decide how each of those sections are going to look like and what content will go where. In a future, if you need to add a new section, you can re-use one of the existing ones as a template. Also, your navigation is going to be more straightforward. I’ve seen some sites where all the pages sit on a root site and there are over 50 of them; now how do you expect anyone to navigate such a flat structure? Your site’s navigation should feel intuitive to your users. Try to break things down into smaller and smaller categories until you get your main navigation buckets nailed down. This will be an exercise that helps you and your design team brainstorm and come up with a line of best fit. Try techniques like Card Sorting if you have the team, time and resources. In the end, your IA is going to be the foundation for your website, so it’s important to invest the time here!
MULTILINGUAL REQUIREMENTS? THINK ABOUT THE IMPLEMENTATION NOW
Again, this is not something that will come up right away for everyone … but if you think you might have a requirement to support multiple languages on your site in a near future, think about the implementation and design your site with those requirements in mind. You might want to use SharePoint variations feature or create a separate site collections for each language. Whatever the approach, knowing it early will reduce the amount of rework once the implementation starts.
WIKIS ARE GREAT FOR SHAREPOINT FOUNDATION SITES
If your site is built on SharePoint Foundation, try designing it around the WIKI infrastructure. By having your main site areas as WIKI libraries you can allow your content authors to create new pages using SharePoint UI. You can also roll up those pages, which translates into an easier content authoring experience without having to resort to the use of tools like SharePoint Designer just to create pages. Leveraging these types of built-in CMS tools, whether in Foundation or Enterprise, will help you encourage your content owners to create fresh content.
DON’T HARDCODE, USE CONTENT QUERY, REUSABLE CONTENT
Content Editor Web Part is a great tool, but if you have a phone number or a link hardcoded in it on 5 different pages, you will really hate yourself when it comes to updating it.
Instead, use a reusable content list, available in Publishing site infrastructure, which allows you to reference a reusable piece of content from a single source. Same goes for roll ups. If you have news articles and such, or even company products as pages, use roll-ups rather than hardcoding links on pages.
ADD SOME CONTENT BEFORE SHOWING IT OFF INTERNALLY
Lorem ipsum might be realistic way of showing how the content will look like on your site, but really … just enter some real content at least for main areas of the site so that people can visualize what the site and all the sections are all about. Content strategy should be at the forefront of your site’s design and development. Understand what types of content you want to share with your audience, how often will it be updated and what format should it be in? Once you map out your content strategy it will be much simpler to find existing, real content that you can use in your mockups. This will help your users with the visualization and reinforce the value of your choices for placement and design.
ARE YOU GONNA USE THAT SEARCH OR SHOULD I “RETURN IT”?
Don’t forget that search is available in SharePoint Foundation and Server versions. If you’re not using it, disable the feature so that search pages are not parsed by search engines and you end up exposing a part of the site that is not branded nor functional, ask me how I know.
NOW THAT YOU MENTION, WHAT ABOUT THOSE SEARCH ENGINES? SEO?
Yes, SharePoint 2010 needs some work when it comes to SEO. There is no way I can summarize it all in this paragraph, so I’ll give you this really helpful link. There is quite a lot on the subject.
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