Tracy van der Schyff

#Office365Challenge Let’s talk about the basics of SharePoint pages.

Today I’ll try my best to explain what SharePoint pages are. Might sound silly to most of you – but keep in mind that most SharePoint Super Users are actually not technical – but more business focussed.

For me, SharePoint pages are similar to walls in a house or office. They’re used to display art and decorations and also for entries to other areas. You can add signs to walls and they have switches that does various things.

On a SharePoint page, you can add text, images, videos, web parts and more:

SharePoint needs pages to display content from lists or libraries and allow for navigation on sites. In other words, each library or list (apps) displays on a page. And each site has a home page. You can add more pages without building extra sites – this is important – as I’ve seen very complicated site structures, just because users don’t know this.

As a Home Page to your site, the page becomes a very important part of navigation, together with the top navigation (Global Navigation)  and left navigation links (Quick Launch).

There are different types of pages in SharePoint:

• Wiki Pages
• Publishing Pages
• Web Part Pages
• Application or Settings Pages

Wiki pages are by far my favourites and I have written LOTS of blogs about what you can do with Wiki Pages. You can find them here. These are great for ‘unstructured’ knowledge sharing, documenting procedures, newsletters etc. I say unstructured as the user can choose the layout and pretty much do and add anything they want.

Publishing pages are a bit more structured. As they rely on layouts (and these can be predefined), it allows for a consistent look and feel across sites.

Web Part pages have different zones where you can add web parts. Site home pages are normally web part pages and gives a clean, structured look. When I start struggling with spaces and alignment of web parts on wiki pages – I always revert back to Web Part pages.

Application or settings pages, are pages used by SharePoint for the administration side of things.  Think of the Site Settings Page, or the Library settings pages. The pages which open for lists and libraries are also part of these.

Join me tomorrow when I’ll start to look at each of these and give you some tips and how to’s.

Overview of my challenge: As an absolute lover of all things Microsoft, I’ve decided to undertake the challenge, of writing a blog every single day, for the next 365 days. Crazy, I know. And I’ll try my best, but if I cannot find something good to say about Office 365 and the Tools it includes for 365 days, I’m changing my profession. So let’s write this epic tale of “Around the Office in 365 Days”. My ode to Microsoft Office 365.

Keep in mind that these tips and tricks do not only apply to Office 365 – but where applicable, to the overall Microsoft Office Suite and SharePoint.