I've been tasked with branding our new corporate website which will be on the SharePoint 2010 platform.
Is anyone aware of some good training courses in the UK that might be able to help on the CSS and Javascript side?
Whilst I know a little about CSS and Javascript, I am a novice! Can anyone help?
I think this should be thrown in, too, going from experienced of performing several branding exercises in SharePoint myself:
Ensure you build a decent foundation of how to efficiently build large numbers of CSS customisations.
If you want to overhaul the look of a SharePoint site to some significant degree, then there are A LOT of CSS classes that you will end up having to override. The last exercise I did resulted in a CSS file that was over 2000 lines long (before whitespace reduction/shorthand).
The most useful skill to have is being able to effectively use CSS selectors, including direct descendants (p > a {...), sibling elements (span + a {...), hierarchical selectors (#unique-element .container_class div span {...), and the like.
The easy way to do it is to use something like Firebug to select an element, find out what CSS class is giving it the current style you want to change (like the font colour) and re-apply/override that style in your CSS style sheet. This can get you so far, but for a full customisation your CSS file will soon become uncontrollably big when filled with these 'hacks' as you go in to change more and more in your customisation.
Always ensure you understand load order of CSS files, too. Make sure your customised CSS file is loaded AFTER corev4.css, so your use of !important is kept to an absolute minimum.
I haven’t personally done any branding with SharePoint yet, but ideal resource I found would be this book Professional SharePoint Branding: Wrox Series. I have used Wrox series books before and they do a really good job of explaining and teaching the most important functions for being productive when new to a technology.
I imagine CSS will probably play the biggest part in this, as typically from what I found JavaScript is used when trying to extend SharePoint beyond its built in functionality.
