UX & IA Design Thinking

I was recently asked: " How can I hide the side nav bar on the main homepage layout ?? I want to be able to use the side NAV with in the team site etc etc, but I don't want it on the front page.. " There are a couple of ways to do this in SharePoint 2010 . If you are using a non-publishing site you can add a Content Editor Web Part to the page and add the following to the HTML Source. <Style> body #s4-leftpanel { display: none; } .s4-ca { margin-left: 0px; } </style> Basically the CSS above hides the left navigation Div, and then sets the content area to not have a left margin. Once you are done, simply modify the web part and hide it on the page. If you are using a publishing site for your homepage simply add the same styles specified above to a custom page layout. That way if you have a need for other pages that do not need the left side navigation you can re-use the page layout.

I created a blog post about 2 years ago on how to create a centered fixed width design for SharePoint 2007 . Well now with a little help from a few other posts ( The SharePoint Muse , Elumenotion , Styled Point ) we can create a SharePoint 2010 fixed with centered design. Now this does come with some drawbacks. By default the ribbon is intended to stay static and always be visible to the contributors on the top of the page. However due to the complexity of fixing a site’s width. The ribbon will need to scroll with the body of the page to avoid a vertical scroll in the middle of your page once it is centered… The trick to get this to work is to do the following: Open up your master Page and remove scroll="no" from the body. If you do not do this there will be no scroll bars on long pop up modal windows In the Master Page search for “s4-workspace” remove this whole DIV tag and its close Div tag at the bottom of the master page. This ID is ...

To convert the large social buttons to smaller ones you simply have to modify the following: Within your custom Master Page search for: “ GlobalSiteLink3 ” Simply Add “ -mini ” to the control ID Original Large Control: <SharePoint:DelegateControl ControlId=" GlobalSiteLink3 " Scope="Farm" runat="server"/> New Small Control ID: <SharePoint:DelegateControl ControlId=" GlobalSiteLink3 -mini " Scope="Farm" runat="server"/> If you want to make the small buttons horizontal versus vertical simply add the following to your custom CSS: .ms-mini-socialNotif-Container{     white-space: nowrap; } Enjoy!