Edit a SharePoint master page layout with Sharepoint designer

Question

I recently got the task to do some minor changes to a sharePoint Master Page and I could need some help because I think I am doing it wrong.

I never worked on something like that before so what I am doing is trying some things out and hope date it works.

I figured out myself how to open the SharePoint Page in the designer and figured out I can change the desing if I add a <style> section in "seattle.master"

I think what I am doing is wrong because I have do use !Important each time... It works but this is sure not the right way to do it. I have zero experience with what I am doing so I don't know which information is correct in google because each time I google something there is an other way to do it.

What exactly I want to do is to romove the left nav, change the color of the header and all links in sharepoint and change the text font.

This is what I did until now:

<style>
.ms-core-navigation { DISPLAY: none }
#contentBox { margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; }
#suiteBarLeft {background-color: red !important}

.ms-core-suiteLink-a, .ms-core-suiteLink-a:visited, a.ms-core-suiteLink-disabled {
color: #fff !important; }

a:link { color: red !important;}
</style>

I get the result what I want (not to 100% but it is a beginning) but I think my way of doing it is wrong.

I would be rely thankful if someone who knows how to do this stuff can recommend me a good documentation to read there is to much information and I don't know where to start.

Answer 1

The better way would be is to add your css changes in a style sheet and reference it to the master page so as to in future you can make changes to it.

For more help of adding and referencing the style sheet to a master page you can refer the link

Answer 2

First of all, don't ever change the default Masterpage seattle.Master directly. it will void your sharepoint license.Always create a copy of it and than set the custom Master page(Copy of default) as default one.

I would recommend you having a CSS file referenced in the master page instead of writing inline css code there itself.

What you doing currently will change the Master page of already created sites and site collections. You need to write a Feature Stapling code which will have this branding when new sites or site collections will be created.