Next up, a giant thank you to everyone who attended this event.  I am always surprised at just how many people come out to learn about SharePoint. And I am humbled every time someone comes to hear me speak.

At SharePoint Saturday the Conference – DC I was able to present a full day workshop: SharePoint Branding 101.  This workshop was exciting for me to try and fit in as much branding goodness into 6 hours as I could.  It was certainly a challenge.

During the day we discussed a full range of topics from Requirements Gathering for Branding all the way through to Implementation and Deployment of Features.

Now that we have all had a moment to take a breath and recover a bit from this very full day of branding learning. I wanted to post out a few things for you.  First up are the slides from the presentation.  Hopefully they will help some of you out as you approach projects in the future. (Thanks for the feedback from a few of you I helped already, it certainly makes me happy to share)

SharePoint Branding 101 Presentation

I really enjoyed spending the day with those of you who were able to join my session in DC. I look forward to meeting many more of the SharePoint Branding intrepid over the next few months!

I am sorry for the delay in posting this.  I also wanted to add a quick listing of helpful tools and items I mentioned in the session.

Wireframing:

Balsamiq Mockups – This is a for purchase application, not free

Visio Graphic Stencils – These are a free download

Visio User Interface Stencils – These are for purchase, not free.

SharePoint Design: (both of these are great and a huge undertaking for both of the creators!)

Starter Master Pages Courtesy of Randy Drisgill – A Gigantic Thanks to Randy

SharePoint 2010 CSS Chart Courtesy of Heather Solomon – A Gigantic Thanks to Heather

SharePoint 2010 Branding and Design is a wondrous world full of new ideas and new challenges. But what does this mean to those of us who design sites to make SharePoint look not like SharePoint? It simply means that we are beginning a new adventure and will learn many lessons along the way.

In the past months I have been on a crazy journey of speaking engagements and conferences. But in the midst of all of this I have been in the trenches working on new SharePoint 2010 branding for clients as well.  In this process I have encountered a few things that really made me scratch my head.

SharePoint Cat and the Raiders of the Lost Ark … Problems with the z-index

Today in Lesson #1 we are going to talk about just one of the small things that has driven me up the wall trying to track down, but in the end once found just made me sit back and think, well that was simple but it still doesn’t make sense why it must work this way.

What do you do when you have a site all redesigned and one element, in this case it was the Welcome Menu dropdowns that just don’t work the right way? The menu items were dropping down behind another element on the page. It just isn’t right I tell you.

So in digging around, looking at custom CSS classes and my custom Master Page I started my quest. I really did kind of feel like Indiana Jones in the Raiders of the Lost Ark as the movie starts and he is running from the giant boulder that threatens to crush our star while he is searching for the golden statue.

I examined the Welcome menu, all seemed to be in place, I checked the Z-index css class and made sure that element was set to display above other items. So what could this problem be. Next option, check the z-index on the other css classes of the Welcome Menu itself.

You see, the z-index and SharePoint 2010 and internet explorer have known issues. Their sessions with a therapist have not been successful yet, in fact they may be headed towards a divorce, they are already separated.

But there has to be a solution to this Welcome Menu dropdown problem that is simple and in my sleep deprived brain I am just not making the easy connection. After much debate and trying to change the z-index out on each element I finally locate the solution. I grabbed the golden statue and ran for the exit.

But wait, what exactly was the solution you ask? Well, you simply have to find the <div> that is the outer container for the element that you were looking to set a z-index on. In my case the <div> was the custom right top menu that contained the search component, the social notifications, and the welcome menu. Once I added a higher z-index on this element, for me I set z-index:9999 it worked perfectly. No more dropdown problems.

This is just the first of many issues with z-index and SharePoint 2010, but I wanted to share this one first as it is a simple fix that we can reuse many times in the future.

I mean what more could you ask for, it has a great line up of speakers, great food, a fun city and SharePoint!

Please go check it out if you are in the area: http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/neworleans/default.aspx

We would be really happy to see you there.  I’m going to be giving three, yes count them, three presentations on SharePoint Branding. Two of these will be SharePoint 2007 and one will be SharePoint 2010.

Tiffany, Casey and Cherie have all done a great job of putting this event together!

After this event, I will post pdfs of my presentations here on my blog, so check back next week for those.  Then I will be taking a little blog break to move to Huntsville, AL.  After that the next place you can see me speak is the SharePoint Evolution Conference in London, UK.

I was able to give not one, not two, but three great sessions on SharePoint, specifically on branding for SharePoint today.  There were good questions in my sessions so I wanted to make sure i put a quick post out today that had links to all my presentations.

In the morning I had a session around SharePoint 2010 and End User Branding.  Here is the link to this session:

Power to the People: Design in the Hands of the End User

My two afternoon sessions were focused on SharePoint 2007 Branding.  Here are links to these sessions:

SharePoint Branding: How Do I Even Begin?

How Intranet Design Can Help with End User Adoption

Thank you to everyone who attended my sessions! And a special thanks to Ryan Duclos for putting on such a great event!

SharePoint design is so much more than just code, so I thought that I would start off a series of blog posts.  These posts are going to be focused around basic design concepts and then cap off with how these concepts can be applied to SharePoint branding.

In my work I have spent time learning about User Experience and how basic design concepts can improve this experience.  I am not going to limit this series to any number of posts and I am going to try and write posts about many topics.  If you have requests please leave them as comments on any of the posts for me to write about.

First up is the Basics of Logo Design.

Next up for me is SharePoint Saturday in Tampa on November 14th. This will be a great event and if you live in that area, I encourage you to attend.

After Tampa, I am going to be participating in SharePoint Saturday in Phoenix, AZ on November 21st.  

This next week is Thanksgiving and I will be travelling to spend time with my family in Mobile, AL.

Then I am off to SharePoint Saturday DC/Northern Virginia on December 5th.

After that is SharePoint Saturday Kansas City on December 12th.

Wow, it looks like I am going to be quite busy in the next few months with lots of SharePointand lots of great information to share with everyone.

I imagine that at some point in all of this that I will be posting some new blog posts on SharePoint 2010 branding.  At least that is my goal.  I am also working on a SharePoint2010 book with a group of people, which is great as well.

I’m always open to any questions or topics that you would like to see me present.  So leave me a comment on my blog if you have any suggestions for me.

What I didn’t expect was the complete, almost overwhelming feeling of being in such a social situation with so many other SharePoint enthusiasts. There were over 7,000 people attending the SharePoint Conference this year. And starting from day 1, we were all excited to be around each other and to try and learn as much as we could from each other in such a short period of time.

I’m going to try and recap what I experienced in being here at the conference.

I got into Las Vegas on Saturday, October 17th.  I wanted to come to town early and experience at least one of the shows on the strip before all the SharePoint started.  So on Saturday when I arrived mid afternoon, I went to the Luxor and checked in.  I then promptly went down to the Luxor pool.  It was so relaxing to leave home and hit a warmer town where I could hang out at the pool again. (okay so I live in Alabama and had been at the pool 2 weeks prior, but it was a chilly 42 degrees F when I left Birmingham that morning)

At the pool, I met up with some of the other SharePoint people who had come to town early. After this I was off to see “O” by Cirque de Soliel at the Bellagio.  So I hopped in a cab and off I went to the Bellagio.  Wow, this show was great.  I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it to anyone who wants to go to a great show in Vegas.  I really loved the mix of circus with water! After the show I headed back to the Luxor to hang with a crew at the bar.

On Sunday we started off the Conference with registration and of course the SharePint event.  There were lots of people there and lots of twitter shirts out in the crowd.  It is so nice when people introduce themselves with their real name and their twitter name.  For those of us who have twitter names that aren’t our real names it is sometimes hard for people to know our actual names. 

On Monday morning, you could feel the excitement for the keynote speeches to start and for the NDA to be lifted on SharePoint 2010. In the main ballroom, people were excited, and even some dancing in the ailses.  What a fun time that was!  The keynote kicked off and the NDA was lifted.  We killed twitter several times throughout the keynote with all the SPC09 tweets.

The rest of the Monday was filled with Overview sessions on all kinds of 2010 topics. I have to say, there were so many wonderful sessions at SPC09 that I had a really hard time picking which ones to attend.  I attended several sessions on Monday, but I won’t go into detail about them.

While at me, it was pleased to be a part of the EndUserSharePoint live blogging team.  Our goal in doing live blogging at these conferences is to give people who can’t attend in person a look into what is being discussed at the conference.  We had a great group of live bloggers this time around. It was a bit of a challenge for us this time with no designated plugs for our laptops in the session rooms, but we did what we could.

Each day  we followed the same schedule, Breakfast, Sessions, Lunch, Sessions, Break, Sessions. I will say that I got quite the workout while at the conference.  The walk from the Luxor to the Conference Center at Mandalay was 1 1/2 miles each way, plus all the additional walking that we did to attend session spread out among 3 floors. It makes me tired just thinking about it and my feet are going to be sore for weeks I think.

Wednesday night was the big conference event with the 80’s Beach Party.  I was sad that I couldn’t stay at this party, but with the stress fractures I had in my foot earlier this year, I can’t walk in sand.  But I did make a quick appearance and got to see Huey Lewis and the News perform the Power of Love.

It was fun to have a birthday at the SharePoint conference and mine was Thursday. I want to thank everyone for the birthday wishes and to everyone who helped me celebrate my birthday! I told people that it was my birthday and I would SharePoint if I wanted to.  I couldn’t have picked a better location or a better group of people to celebrate with.

Withthe official conference ending on Thursday, it was time to say goodbye to some of my friends both old and new.  I was lucky enough to attend the post conference sessions, so my time in Vegas was not over.  I spent Friday with Todd Klindtand Shane Young in their install and Upgrade session.  Then after I headed out for one last night on the town.

Over all this was a completely overwhelming conference, my feet hurt, I’m tired, and my brain is full of SharePoint 2010.  But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

I met so many people to even mention them by name, but I want you all to know that I enjoyed meeting you all and that I hope to continue to meet new people everywhere I go.

(If you don’t listen to the PodShow you should go to www.sharepointpodshow.com and start listening.)

So after the interview I have been waiting anxiously to hear the show and hoping that I actually sounded intelligent. And then today, I finally got to listen to the full show.  It was great and I just wanted to put a quick post out to thank the guys.

I had a great time doing the interview with Rob!

So I just wanted to say a really big thank you to Rob Foster and Brett Lonsdale and Nick Swann of the SharePoint Pod Show for extending me this opportunity.