Recently, I have shown the design Manager in workshops and other presentations and experienced that the audience is interested and want to get started and use this tool when designers should be developed, so I thought that writing a few blog posts in a series of two entries with the aim that you should be able to get started step by step but also you can download a complete example from a HTML based on the latest standards, including CSS and JS.
The design manager is a new feature in SharePoint (On-Prem – standard & enterprise and SharePoint Online) and provides a new approach for branding SharePoint 2013 interfaces. It is quite easy to work with and you will pretty quickly be able to create an awesome branding for your SharePoint environment without the need of longer experience of components in the SharePoint user interface such as NET controls or master pages in depth. Note that you can still create your branding as you did in previous versions of SharePoint by using SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.
- Create your branding outside SharePoint with tools like Dreamweaver
- Import the branding files to SharePoint and it will be automatically converted to valid SharePoint master page format
- Add SP controls like search box, site name
- Import & Export the branding as an user solution (WSP)
- Ability to create mockups based on templates
The following posts will include:
Part II
- A concrete example: Design manager walkthrough step by step
- When should you use the Design Manager and when you should use SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio instead
Part III
- A complete downloadable example including a HTML, MasterPage, Page Layouts, CSS, JS and Images
- Snippets and their syntax & some tips n tricks
- References to more information about the design manager and links to other blogs in this topic
If you’re about to get started with the design manager or if you are considering which method to use for your SharePoint branding I hope you will enjoy the following posts. Stay in tune for the next post which will be published shortly
This series contains so far by this posts:
Part I (This post)
Design Manager in SharePoint – Part II
/ Christian
Me & My SharePoint [FrontEnd] 
Hi,
Nice post,thanks for sharing .
Sharepoint Developers
We are trying to locate a knowledge expert who can help explain how to utilize dreamweaver CS6 pages or snippet code in SharePoint 2007 web parts. Would you be able to assist or point us to a developer? We will need to utilize on a corporate website with strong authentication.
Thanks in advance.
Is it me… or have the posts just not been worked out yet? lol Sounds like an interesting series!
Hi. We are starting a corporate branding campaign and would be very interested in joining a discussion on how to use Dreamweaver with Sharepoint. Please let us know if you will be hosting a few sessions.
Hi, thanks for your replies – yea I’ll be posting the part II quite soon, stay tuned!
Hi Christian, interesting series!
Is it me or have you just confused us by calling the second part, Part I above and naming it Part II in the actual post? Or, did I miss Part I somehow? 🙂
Hi, great obersvation Thomas! I have now renamed this post to Part I instead. Rock on and thanks mate!
Excellent Post and Good Details about Sharepoint Design Manager 2013. I like the way you shared all minor details on topic, brings more celerity. Thanks Mate!