5 tips for creating delightful SharePoint pages
2023 Updates:
New feature: Section Templates
Image editor enhancements
The page editing capabilities in SharePoint Online help authors create well-designed, and dare we say, delightful pages. We put together a list of our top 5 tips to make visually interesting, readable, and delightful SharePoint pages:
Edit images for a visual experience
Plan to use more horizontal space
Use different link styles
Add sections to break up pages
Go further with collapsible sections
1. Edit images for a visual experience
The SharePoint Lookbook is the place to get inspiration for designing SharePoint sites and pages.
You will notice that many page templates from the Lookbook rely heavily on images to display and link to content:
Examples of visual page layouts on a modern SharePoint page
We don’t recommend adding images just to fill space or add background context. Rather, use them to create a better user experience by guiding people to the content they’re looking for, or the task they are completing. Tie an image to a bold headline by using the right text formatting and web parts with your images (more on that below), and users will be able to scan and skim your page faster.
To add images to pages, you have a multitude of choices:
Image web part (the standard option, of course!)
Image Gallery web part
In the Text web part, you can add an image
Hero web part
Call to Action web part
Images are also used in News web parts, Quick Links layouts, the Highlighted Content web part to display documents/pages/sites, page headers, and even the Events web part! They’re everywhere.
Optimize and edit images
It’s important to think about the placement and sizes of images. Here’s a quick example of adding and resizing an image within the Text web part (a recent feature addition to SharePoint modern pages):
Add and resize images within the Text web part to create more appealing layouts
Sometimes, we find that authors complain about images in SharePoint being too large or taking up too much space on a page. By using the resize option and left aligning the image as shown above, you can easily create a better layout for your page.
Note: the image editor is further enhanced in 2023 with more editing capabilities including cropping to common aspect ratios and adding a text overlay.
The Hero and Call to Action web parts are your friends when creating visual layouts that respond to different screen sizes and formats, and link to other areas of the employee portal.
The Call to Action works best at its default height, so we recommend choosing an abstract image, or a background image that works at narrower heights. It’s a good option for creating a banner or alert-type part of the page. For narrow heights, pages have handy tools to set the focal point of the image and to zoom in/out. For example, here’s how to set an image for use in the Call to Action web part:
Set a focal point and zoom on images
Where to get the images?
Images are typically part of an organization’s brand, and you may have an image bank that you want authors to start from. For this reason, we recommend adding the Organizational Assets library to the picker which gives authors access to a library of photos, logos and icons that your Brand owner provides. This is added by an administrator, and then the Brand owner can keep the files up to date. This shows up right next to the Stock images and Web search in the Image picker:
Organizational Assets option in the Image picker
If you don’t have access to an image bank, stock photos and a Bing Image search are embedded into the Image picker. These are good places to start as Microsoft 365 subscribers have full access to a stock photo library of content.
Share these tips with your intranet authors, and take some time to explore all the image options and layouts you have with SharePoint pages – these will help you create more readable and delightful pages.
2. Plan to use more horizontal space
Pages on SharePoint Communication Sites don’t have left navigation, so you have more horizontal space to work with than in older versions of SharePoint.
Three column layouts are more common, so we advise authors to use this type of section on landing pages to display content efficiently. For example, use multiple News web parts on a News landing page to display categories of news:
Example of a three column layout using News web parts
You can even go to four columns on a page and really maximize that space at the top of the page. To do this, add a vertical section which places a column down the right side of the page.
Add a vertical section to a SharePoint page
Adding this to a page with sections that have three columns gives you lots of space to share content:
Example of a four column layout
3. Use different link styles
The Quick Links web part is another useful web part that is worth getting to know. It’s common to use it multiple times on the same page. Here are several different ways to display Quick Links:
Apps ‘pinned’ to a page in a button format with icons and descriptions
A grid view of links with icons
Or for more visual experience, try it with images:
A grid view of links with images
In this last example, a standard list of related documents is in a simple list with small icons to indicate the link type:
List of documents with icons to differentiate between link types
We recommend giving authors a starting point for a couple of Quick Links styles in page templates, so that there is some consistency across the pages in the intranet. In addition, provide training and examples so that people can create visually appealing and useful lists of links.
4. Add sections to break up pages
Sections are a very useful feature that were not in classic Sharepoint. You can use sections to break up pages by columns and colour.
To add a section, click the add new section (blue plus sign) in Edit mode:
How to add a new section to a SharePoint page
There are two special sections that can only be added independently of each other: Full-width section and Vertical section. In other words, the Full-width section can be added to a page that isn’t using a Vertical section, and vice-versa.
The other sections can be used in combination to create a variety of page layouts. For example, just by using sections, colours and sizing text in different ways, you can create an interesting page without images. This animation below gives you an idea of how many sections are on the page - so don’t hold back, and use sections!
Adding sections on a page with different colour backgrounds can create a visually delightful page
Another tip is to use spacers in a section to create an empty colour block to break up a dense page:
Use sections generously and in combination to create pages that break up content into logical chunks and help users scan pages easily.
2023 Update: Section Templates
Section Templates are now available when creating your pages and news content. Section templates give a quick start to creating content using sections, with pre-defined layouts. Use these in different combinations to create your own section layouts.
Add a section template to a page for a quick starting point
5. Go further with collapsible sections
Another enhancement to Sections is the ability to expand/collapse sections.
This is a great way to break up a page that has detailed content such as tables, definitions or historical material. Here’s an example of how the sections expand and collapse on a page:
Expanding and collapsing sections
To create collapsible sections, add a section and edit the section settings to enable the collapsible toggle:
Additional settings add a divider line, and whether the default display is collapsed or not.
In Summary
SharePoint pages have useful editing powers to create visual pages, rich landing pages that link to other areas, or display dense information in a way that is easy to read and scan. Modern pages are much improved from previous SharePoint versions, and we highly recommend moving document content, such as PDFs, into pages where it makes sense.
Take some time to explore all the editing options available to you, and let loose your creativity to create wonderful pages!
Need help designing SharePoint pages as part of your employee portal? Reach out and we are happy to help you design page templates for authors, migrate from Classic pages, and more.
