Tuesday December 9, 2008
Beating Down the Breadcrumbs
This morning I was working on some IA for a SharePoint implementation and daydreaming about a world without MOSS. In an effort to embrace constraints, I landed on a few ways to tame SharePoint’s layout and navigation in order to make it more consistent across multiple site collections and team sites.
The first order of business is locking down the page-level breadcrumbs – because those little bastards can’t seem to sit still.
Heather Solomon has whipped up a handy chart highlighting the variety of ways different page templates display their breadcrumbs. By modifying these templates to match your master page (custom or OOB), you can take control of their position across the whole shebang. You may also consider making those breadcrumbs larger. They are SharePoint’s main method of navigation and are way too small.
The second order of business concerns the overall page layout. I love grids and 960 pixel-wide websites are becoming pretty standard. Unfortunately, SharePoint farts in the genéral direccion of your precious grids. User-generated spreadsheets, calendars, and funky webparts abound – making it impossible to implement a fixed-width design. With this kind of liquid layout, anything on the sides changes position from page to page depending on the content. If the page is centered in the browser, that means the left side navigation is moving around too.
By sticking to a left-aligned design, you can keep the most important stuff toward the top-left portion of the layout, ensuring that (a) it sits it’s butt down in one spot and (b) it doesn’t get pushed off to the right and out of sight by some 18 column spreadsheet.
EMC helps organizations create superior IT environments, from infrastructure solutions all the way up to software development and user experience design.
Learn more…About This 404er
Matt Donovan
Matt is a Visual Designer at EMC, who hails from a background in photography and videography. He loves communicating. Whether visually or verbally, connecting with people is his passion. In every design, his goal is to understand and be understood by his audience.