What is the best way to implement custom branding?

Question

We branded our site with a custom master page, alternate CSS, and site theme. Everytime we create new sites or site collections we have to manually setup these things to get a consistent look. Is there a way to have this set automatically when a new sites or site collections are created?

Answer 1

Features and solutions is the way to go when deploying your custom branding.

When branding SharePoint also remember the option of using Themes. Themes gives you a way to brand across application pages, standard master pages / page layouts in a consistent manner.

Branding with SharePoint Themes Master Pages vs. Themes: Which Do You Choose?

hth Anders Rask

Answer 2

The way we did this was through features. We had a feature that applied our branding and then using feature stapling that feature was activated whenever we created a new site or site collection.

EDIT: Like Anders says, themes do provide some extra benefits. The benefit of them working on application pages can be handled by a simple httpmodule. Check out my blog post with code here: http://www.thelineberrys.com/default-category/using-your-sharepoint-sites-master-page-on-all-application-pages-3.html on how to implement the httpmodule.

Answer 3

Here is a function that will set the masterpage for your site (including sub sites) that you can use. Just put it in a feature receiver and you can activate it when creating new sites, etc. Then you will have the same masterpage for all your sites.

http://chrisbarba.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/set-custom-master-page/