Awwwards
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A place where we talk SharePoint, web design, inspirations, trends and everything in between.

Category Archives: SharePoint

Personal, SharePoint, Web Design, , , , ,

3 Reasons Why Winning an Awwward Would Mean the Wwworld to PinkPetrol

After months and months of building, rebuilding, redesigning and then finally launching we are excited to be informed that our website had passed the nomination benchmark, making it a potential recipient of the Site Of The Day award.

We are pleased to inform you that your submission to Awwwards has been approved.

The site will be fully checked and tested by our submissions team, and then posted in our “Nominees” section and will be evaluated over 7 days by our international jury and Awwwards’ users. During this time, you have up to 5 days to modify this information in the “submissions” section of your user account.

If your submission is awarded a high enough score, the site will be placed in a queue to appear as “Site of the Day”. If successful, it will also be included in our book “The Best 365 Websites Around The World” in 2015

Well, I can tell you this there was a massive high five in the office and even if we are unsuccessful it is still an “winner” in our books – for seeing our new website and rebrand come to fruition.

Awwward Nominee for PinkPetrol.com

So why are we so excited to be nominees and why do we want to win?

 

1. It will show we made the right decision to start again & again & again!

We have spent a fair few months, redesigning our new website, and a few more months redesigning it. Throughout these times we have often asked ourselves – why are we doing this? Shall we just get it up there and tweek? We have all collectively said – no.

If you want to do something good, then take your time and do it properly – was written on the wall. There would be no point rushing it to get it live for the sake of it. We don’t do this with our clients so why would we do it for our own website – arguably our most important one?

 

2. We would be the first SharePoint design company to get one

Within the SharePoint industry we are always looking to be the most creative company, to offer the most creative solutions and this for us would be amazing for all involved in the agency. Our company is a little different because again within an industry that is IT focused and in particular around the SharePoint product we are not focused on the nuts n’ bolts – but the design, branding & UI/UX side of things.

 

3. It would be bigger than us, putting a town on the map!

Since launching our new website the support and appreciation we’ve been shown has been simply overwhelming and again shows that we were right to rebrand and relaunch. We are based in  a small town called Telford, not only would it put the SharePoint product on the map but the town of Telford too.

With all that said, we appreciate all the votes, support, shares & likes. We feel as anagency we do a lot for a clients, which we love doing so its nice to be recognised albeit small in the  grand scale of things.

So please vote if you like our site – http://www.awwwards.com/best-websites/pinkpetrol

Many thanks!

Logos, SharePoint, ,

SharePoint 2013 High Res Logos

After a few people including myself finding it hard to find a decent SharePoint 2013 logo, I decided to create one myself.

http://www.mediafire.com/?i5f5tzjrdasvawa

What’s included in the ZIP is the following – Fireworks PNG, Photoshop PSD and an Illustrator AI & a high res Fireworks PNG file. All vector based using the hex code #0072C6

As a side note, I hope I don’t get into trouble with Microsoft over this, if they can point me in the right director to their official logos etc. then I will remove this post.

End user adoption, Intranet, SharePoint, ,

10 ideas for your new SharePoint 2010 intranet!

So your SharePoint intranet is branded, now time for the content? Here’s some ideas..

Over the last few years we have developed a host of different intranets. From the socially focused ones to the business focused and there in-between. Recently we have just developed an intranet for Capgemini and it was in our opinion the perfect mix of in terms of content, mixing social and business to get a happy medium.

Here are some ideas that you people out there may find useful when creating your new company intranet.

1. Company jargon / Acronym buster!

We all know what it’s like working in an organisation where they talk the language of Acronym! So a nice little A-Z of acronyms and any other made up words for those people that don’t know what they all mean! Using SharePoint 2010, this is perfect example of where wiki pages can be used.

2. New Starter Pack

When we take on new projects we are all effectively the ‘new starter’ so we are perfectly placed to say whether or not a ‘new starter pack’ would be useful for not for all those important, boring details new starters need to know, e.g fire exits, who the high level managers are, what’s on the menu for the canteen etc..

3. Buy, sell, swap shop facility

This is an idea that is hit and miss. One example I saw was they used it alot, people loved it and it was a key driver to the intranet. On the other hand, people were advertising firearms on there (I am not joking). If they work then its one easy place to get rid, sell, swap your unwanted items quickly & easy! And if your intranet has one office location, you can save money on the delivery!

4. Location based information

Information based on where you are can make your life so much easier. So why not have on your intranet all the information based on where your working such as local taxi numbers, the best restaurants – which you could even review, train times if your outside of London, London tube map & service information as well as local good hotels & the low down on the best travel routes & roads to avoid! You could go a step further and change that location based on where you login!

5. The social & fun side

The happy mix of business & social is perfect. Where you have a bunch of important information, why not show some interesting quotes with a few fun ones in there. You can do this vica versa to, mixing important company information with the photo galleries & not forgetting the Dilberts! everyone in IT loves those cartoons.

6. Graphical company timeline

An idea I haven’t have the chance to put into fruition yet, but what about something like what Kelloggs timeline, they have done? Cool hey. Well what about something like that for your company intranet, detailing all key points of the organisation, why they are important & who is making the company great etc..

7. Video fault, *insert-company-name-here*Tube – basically, videos!

The way people see information is changing, always envolving and with the way we can view things on multiple devices, platform etc, then its no wonder video usage, marketing and general viewing is rising with over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube (taken from YouTubes statatics). A great promotional video showing your staff what is coming next within the company is a great example where this works or even having the CEO do a quick video blog on his thoughts etc, either way, some good examples of where you can utilise video in your intranet.

8. Infographics or real time analytical data

Do you know how many calls your IT help desk deals with a day? No? Nor do I but I bet its a massive amount, so don’t be so hard on them! This kind of data is real useful when looking at potential cost saving exercises maybe, like cutting down there 1.5 million sheets of people your company may turn over – here are some great Infographic examples over at Visual.ly. Leading on from that, having some kind of visual service status is a great way of telling your employees that – everything is ok. Skype do a cool thing with their ‘beating heart’ service status – so cool!

9. How to guides

As we all know, SharePoint is a fantastic tool for publishing, document management, workflow bla bla bla but with all the power comes all the instructions to use them all and use them well. Instead of writing 30 step guides to doing various tasks, break them down into bite sized chunks like how to add a document, how to create a custom list for your users, you could even use Camtasia and do a video with narration over the top to help those who love videos. In my experience people remember about 70 percent of what they learn on courses, so using that example people will remember how to add a document but probably wont remember how to check it in – so you tell them!

10. Where are you? – Office & employee locations

I saw a glimpse of the EA Games intranet once, they used the Sims & their diamonds above their heads for their staff & the combined that with 3D desk views which you could look at each employees desk to see what they liked & did – pretty cool hey! This is very cool but if you work in a forever changing organisation then this would be a nightmare to manage. Using SharePoint 2010 and its lovely MySites users could manager this data themselves, because well really it’s in their interest to be found by people? Maybe! Maybe not, either way in my opinion it would be really helpful. Also for office locations, this would be really useful and if you wanted to be super cool you could utilise the Google Maps API, sorry Bing and combine the two.

Do you have some intranet ideas? Let us know below or on twitter #intranetideas

Branding, Conferences & Events, CSS, SharePoint, , , , , ,

SharePoint Saturday: Slide Deck : Giving your SharePoint site a new lick of paint

On SharePoint Saturday I presented my session on SharePoint Saturday – Giving your SharePoint site a new lick of paint – and as promised here is my slide deck from the session.

SharePoint Saturday – Giving your SharePoint site a new lick of paint

View more presentations from Sam Dolan.
Branding, CSS, SharePoint, , , , , , , ,

PinkPetrol SharePoint 2010 Master Page & Styles

After my recent presentations at both SharePoint Saturday UK and SharePoint User Group UK, I have decided it would be a good idea and great help to people to release the ‘this is what I prepared earlier’ files including styles, images and Master Page that were used in both presentations.

So what do you get? you will a Master Page which is a slight modification of v4.master and all the styles that can give your out of the box installation a different look albeit fuchsia pink, which is an awful colour I know and all the required images. All the images are PinkPetrol related such as my logo and banner but you can use these files as a templates and obviously you can change and make your own using something like Photoshop, Fireworks or Gimp (which is free).

If you click and follow the link below, you will be able to download all the files with instructions.

http://www.mediafire.com/?6dk5fwiagld9za6

I hope you find it useful and <shamelessplug>if you need any help, then please get in touch </shamelessplug>.

Enjoy!

Branding, CSS, SharePoint, , , ,

Making the SharePoint 2010 Ribbon scroll like a normal site!

So Microsoft decided to dock/stick/fix the ribbon to the top of the page like so.

Whilst in my session I covered how to make this scroll and gain a lot of questions – Why did they do this? and what is the fix? Well the fix is very simple. But for the ‘why’ I am not sure why. I think they wanted people to also have access to the ribbon much to how the other Office applications work.

  1. First thing you need to do is remove or change scroll=”no” to “yes” in the <BODY> – this will make the page scroll conventionally.
  2. Next you need to remove or change the “s4-workspace” ID tag from line 293 (in v4.master).
  3. I usually just rename it to s4-workspaced so if you need to change it make, you can just remove the ‘d’
  4. Next you need to add some CSS either in a referenced custom stylesheet or directly in the masterpage. The CSS code is very simple it is – body {overflow:auto!important;}

And this should make your page scroll. Fairly straight forward but probably the most requested ‘feature’ to remove when I am branding SharePoint 2010.

Please note – this will mean that if you have a large page and you need to edit the properties you will need to scroll back up.

Conferences & Events, CSS, SharePoint, , , , , , ,

SharePoint Saturday – My Day, My Session, My Verdict

On Saturday 2nd October the UK saw its first SharePoint Saturday event and what an event it was. I want to be completely honest in my post because I feel that is important for the future events and so that people can really see how great the event was and I’m sure will be in the future.

So I set off in the morning woken up by the best alarm clock – my baby daughter. There was me worrying about sleeping in that morning that I set 3 alarms – first at 7.00am, second at 7:15am and the third at 7:30am, only to be woken at 6:55am! I set off for the event with Andrew Woodward who was kind enough to give me a lift. Once we arrived we headed straight into the Key Note speech from Mark Miller and Joel Oleson – Mark did a funny, yet to the point speech combined with some excellent videos based on the theme of Lord of Rings. Joel followed with a series of analogies based on juggling roles and responsibilities – at least that is what I thought…

Key Note with Mark Miller – Hobbits, Wizards and Elves – Discuss SharePoint 2010

 

The attendees – a large crowd for the first SharePoint Saturday

 

The first session I attended was Matt Groves – SharePoint in the Cloud, which gave me a great insight into what is to expect and the future of SharePoint, something I am interested in, in particular the whole BPOS scheme and what I will mean to myself & my business. All in all another polished presentation from Matt.

Matt Groves delivering SharePoint in the Cloud

Next was my session, although I had decided I was going to attend Chris O’Brien’s session but I couldn’t because I was presenting myself! Prior to the day I had a nightmare and awoke in a cold sweat, I dreamt that my virtual machine crashed and I couldn’t get it back! So I was pretty nervous about presenting but I was also confident in my subject and like to think I know what I am doing when it comes to SharePoint Design & Branding. I was lucky enough to do trial run of my session at a recent Manchester Usergroup back in September.

My session started with a quick run down about what tools I will using during the session and what I will specifically covering such as changing the top and left navigation, adding a banner, logo and revamping the search . My VM started a bit slow then kicked into gear and allowed me to do a 45 minute live branding session showing you what a small piece of knowledge and the right tools can achieve using SharePoint Designer and CSS. I then wrapped up my session with a design showcase of SharePoint 2010 sites that showed the possibilities of what can be achieved – accompanied with a piece of music made famous by Tony Hart. I think was my session was well received and my session was pretty full – I just hope people enjoyed it but more importantly took something away from it whether that be an insight into SharePoint branding, what can be achieved or even the tips to actually doing it – that’s what makes it worthwhile. On a side note if you liked/disliked my session or you thought of any areas where I could improve, I would really appreciate a comment or an email. Thank you in advance.

Me, getting to grips with my slow Virtual Machine!

 

Me, talking about SharePoint Design & Branding

 

The final product – taking SharePoint out of the box and adding some pink petrol to it!

 

After my session I took a little break and had some lunch, food was good considering the event was free. I had a chat with a few people such as new 21APPS recruit Ant Clay and then planned what sessions I was attending next.

Lunch time!

 

Next I headed to Andrew Woodward‘s session – Real World Sandboxed Solutions. What I loved about this session were two things. Firstly the annotated slides, using his fancy new laptop with touch screen, the interaction was brilliant, sketching out development paths/servers etc – this worked really well. Secondly I loved the crowd interaction, Andrew has this knack of getting people talking, something that isn’t seen much in these type of sessions. The session turned from presentation to group session/conversation and was really well received. The session covered Sandbox solutions – a new feature in SharePoint 2010. Andrew showed us how he, James Fisk and myself developed and built 21SCRUM using a Sandbox solution for the development. At the end of Andrew’s session he gave away packs of his cool 21SCUM post it notes – if you can get some of these (get in touch with him, he may send you some) I would recommend them!

Andrew Woodward and his live annotates

 

After Andrew’s session I took a break and caught up with Mark Miller of EndUserSharePoint.com, a great guy and a key figure head in the SharePoint community. I have a lot of respect for this guy, he beams positivity and is one of those people you could talk to for hours. We had a picture together and talked SharePoint – well what else were we going to talk about? Oh yes, his shirts – brilliant.

Mark Miller and I – loving the shirt!

My final session was Creating an effective and highly developed Learning Gateway for education with SharePoint 2007 and 2010 with Dave Coleman and Mike Herrity. A session I was looking forward to because they were talking about their Learning Gateway in which I designed and branded. The session was a great insight into what they have achieved in the education world, something they are proud of. They showed the live version of their Learning Gateway from back in 2001 and how it has come on leaps and bounds to SharePoint 2010. It was a good session and reminded me a bit of Laurel & Hardy or the Chuckle Brothers? To me, to you!

The Dave Coleman and Mike Herrity double act!

 

The conference was wrapped up by Brett thanking everyone and with an ask the experts session followed by I think everyone’s favourite bit – the prizes!

The prizes that people could win here fantastic , you had the chance to win an XBOX360, an Amazon Kindle, various book vouchers, USB Headsets, MSDN licences, development books, tshirts and an Apple iPad! I think you will agree some absolutely fantastic prizes but you had to be there to win it! And some poor person chap missed out on the Kindle and some lucky second drawn person won it!  I personally didn’t win anything but my friend Peter Oare did – a book and software vouchers, twice!

The free prizes – XBOX360, iPad & Kindle to name but a few.

So with the first SharePoint Saturday wrapped up it was on to the SharePint! In the bar I had a few beers with some great guys. I met Seb Matthews for the first time, he’s a top bloke and loves Formula 1 and Fulham – someone has to! I also met up with Intelligent Decisioning guys – Mark Macrae, Andy Smith, Tony Pounder and his son Jamie; who all helped putting this fantastic event on.

SharePint well underway

With the SharePint drank Brett Lonsdale, Ant Clay, Matt Groves, Andrew Woodward, James Fisk, Veronique Palmer, Benjamin Athawes, Mark Miller and myself headed into Solihull for a ShareCurry – one of the best curries I have had before!

Time for a ShareCurry

Once that was consumed – I headed home for a much needed cup of tea.

So what can I pick at? Again I want to be honest and I think no WiFi was a bit of a problem, however that didn’t stop the constant flood of tweets and updates from the different hand held devices. Water was another one, I couldn’t find a glass of water anywhere! And that is about it – 2 measly picky points from a free event and the first Intelligent Decisioning have put on. Not bad I think.

So people there you have it, the first SharePoint Saturday, a completely free event put on by people in their own time to help other learn more about SharePoint and a place where you can gain knowledge, talking to experts and professionals and socialise at the same time – FOR FREE! A fantastic event, a great atmosphere, great content and great people.

Thanks for reading, but I want to say thanks to the organisers and thanks to the other speaking for taking time out of their busy schedules to make this great event happen.

All the speakers!

Thanks to James Love for taking the pictures – the full album can be found on ID Live’s Facebook page.

My session can be viewed below – resources to follow

SharePoint Saturday – Giving your SharePoint site a new lick of paint

View more presentations from Sam Dolan