I’ve had the honor and priveledge of working with Sharepoint 2007 over the last few weeks. Whether this sentence is complete irony or not, I’ll leave in the middle for now .

Applying our company’s logo and design to the overall layout of the site turned out to be not as easy as I thought it would be.
Of course, the most basic part was making a new masterpage with Sharepoint Designer 2007. This I did by making a copy of the default.master and adapt it to my own liking. I created a new css style for it so everything would stay a bit clean. This worked great for the public site parts. Our logo was shining all over the place … except … not “all” over the place …

The Sharepoint administration pages don’t seem to like to blend in very much. Turns out that these pages use a different master page: application.master. Whenever you google it everyone seems to scream about how dangerous it is to alter this page and you really shouldn’t mess with it. So you can imagine I wasn’t really jumping on the idea.
So I tried to find workarounds. The homepage administration pages seemed to use the same core.css file as the user pages, so I copy/pasted the css styles in my custom made css into the core.css at the bottom. So this fixed that problem.
But other administration pages seemed to use a totally different core.css file, one located at “…\Program files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\template\layouts\1033\styles”. So I did the same for that file.

Et voila … my site looks like it should w/o modifying the application.master page itself.Â
Some things you should hold into account:

• make sure your image paths are correct
• my master page didn’t differ that much from an original one. The parts I didn’t want visible I just put the position on absolute and the left tag on -10000px so it wouldn’t show up on my screen. On my own master page I could just delete these parts, but this is another way not to show them w/o editing the master page. This of course is only possible if the application.master page isn’t that different from the one you want to accomplish.
• make sure you check in, publish and approve the master page you created, otherwise other people won’t be able to see it

Some useful links:

• Customize application.master
• All site content page not using master page
• CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007

Good luck I’d say!Â