Have you tried using a theme? With a theme you can modify images and style sheets, and then apply it to a WSS site  and it will affect all the pages  for that site.

I wasn't aware an FP theme had a Banner element. This works BUT ...it only works for the web site  home page.

For example, a document library AllItems.aspx doesn't display the top  banner from the theme. I've tried opening this page  and specifically applying theme as well as setting the them as the default for the web site.

It appears only certain WSS site pages  pick up the theme? ..e.g. the home  page and nothing else.

I've found some mention here (office.microsoft.com/.../HA011873901033.aspx) that each page  needs to be "diagramed" as part of FrontPage's Navigation view.

I'm guessing that this applies to pure FP2003 sites and not WSS sites?

I've tired using FP2003 Shared Borders on my test WSS site  and they don't seem to work either.

Has anyone tried using FP2003 Shared Borders with WSS?

The problem with customizing is the use of templates ... each and
every one of them must be touched (assuming you are doing more than
changing a few values of the css). To affect logos, different
gradients, etc... you must touch each template in
<localdrive>/ProgramFiles/CommonFiles/MicrosoftShared/WebSereverExten
sions/60/template/1033/.,in conjuction with the css. This folder
contains the templates that are used each time a new page  is
created. You can achieve most of
this through the use of themes, keeping in mind of course that you
have to apply the new theme to each new site. It took me quite a
while to touch every template for our installation - the public site
is here : http://public-sp.missouri.edu . Each template was edited
because of the branding we did for the rollout.

We want to create a single new site/template and have a banner image  inserted about the top  nav bar  on (almost) every page  in the WSS site.

This simple request  seems to more difficult than it needs to be.

http://public-sp.missouri.edu appears to be an SPS 2003 portal site  ...which makes things very easy  because the default SPS configuration already includes a banner image  above the top  nav bar.

That's another example of branding SPS. The challenge is to do something similar with a plain old WSS site.

The challenge is branding and selecting a method to do so, not whether it is SPS or WSS. Both SPS and WSS run off site  definitions. You can manually go into the site definition files (a collection of ASPX and XML files on the web server) and make layout changes. A major drawback to the SharePoint layout code, is that it is not centralized. So the same layout code is in every file and thus every file has to be updated. Depending on how many list definitions the site definition includes, the number of files that has to be edited can grow quite large.

In addition to site definition file edits, you can alter the way a WSS sites looks with a theme (which is a collection of CSS and image  files).

You can make more limited branding changes to either SPS or WSS through editing CSS and images.

With that brief “what is what” explanation out of the way, here are your options IMHO:

1) Try to add  a banner using a theme – you tried this already and it would only appear on the home  page.

2) Get tricky with CSS and/or JavaScript and try to insert the banner on each page  above the existing nav  bar. I have not done this personally, so it is just a suggestion.

3) Create a custom site definition based off the STS site definition and add the banner to each ASPX file where needed. This will be time and labor intensive.

May I suggest an alternative way to look at this banner as well… Through CSS tweaks, you can shift the WSS top  site navigation  over to the far right, opening up the left side for a custom logo or graphics. This does not create a “banner above” but may give you the space you are looking for. If you use this method, you only need to work with the CSS and some images. No intensive site definition labor will be required. You can also open up the size of the existing navigation bar  to be taller and provide more space for a logo or custom graphics.

Re: 2) Get tricky with CSS and/or JavaScript and try to insert the banner on each page  above the existing nav  bar. I have not done this personally, so it is just a suggestion.

Thanks for the detailed reply (again) Heather.

#2 (using CSS and behaviors) is our favored approach and works fine on SPS sites. The approach also works most of the time on WSS sites ...except for pages  that use the RichTextEdit IE control (e.g. the RTF field in the New Item dialog in an Announcements list).

When we use a CSS behavior with onDocumentReady to inject the HTML for a table that holds our IMG tag, the banner works fine but the RichTextEdit control appears but is disabled. It's not the behavior itself (an empty OnDocumentReady function works fine) ...only when the function inserts the table+img HTML do we have a problem on pages that use RichTextFields.

Any thoughts on latter would be appreciated.

"To affect logos, different
gradients, etc... you must touch each template in
<localdrive>/ProgramFiles/CommonFiles/MicrosoftShared/WebSereverExten
sions/60/template/1033/."


For WSS sites, you only need to modify the contents of one site  definition (what
Roy referred to as a template). WSS sites are based off the STS site definition.

For SPS sites, you only need to modify the contents of the site definitions you
choose to use on your portal (meaning you may not choose to use the News
definition or the Community definition). There is no way to change which
definition a portal home page  is based off of, so you would need to alter the
SPS site definition and one other for areas (like SPSTOC or SPSTOPIC) at a bare
minimum.

Modification of default site definitions are not supported by MSFT (FYI and as a
disclaimer). It is recommended that you copy/paste a default site definition to
create your own custom site definition.

In my particular case, we used a different size page  logo, but kept
the same name and just changed the graphic in the image  folder. The
restriction that each site  definition uses of 49 x 49 for that logo
made it necessary for me to touch each .aspx page in the directory
to remove that particular line of code. If you can change the image
to something you like in that small of space, customizing will
require much less labor!

We've gotten our CSS Behavior to work reliably to: a) insert a banner image  about a *WSS* tool bar  *and* b) have it not have it affect the Rich Edit control on the "New Item" pages.

Our original attempt linked to the BODY CSS tag. We retried our behavior using the .ms-main class on a clean WSS VPC image and it worked fine.