SharePoint: Adding a company logo

It shouldn’t take 2+ hours to figure out how to add a company logo to a SharePoint site! But that’s how long it took me the other day.

I’ve got SharePoint installed on my server (I think it’s SharePoint 2007, but as there’s no ‘branding’ that I can see, I have no idea which version it is). I wanted to set up an internal website in preparation for some software that I’ll be installing in the next few weeks that links into SharePoint. I’ve used SharePoint before, but way back in the early days. I found it very clunky to configure at the time, and, as a user of another company’s SharePoint 2003 installation, I found it incredibly hard to search because so much ‘stuff’ got dumped into multiple SharePoint subsites, it was hard to figure out where you were. I hated it.

So, into the breach!

I opened up my default SharePoint installation (http://companyweb) from Internet Explorer on my PC and went looking at the settings. I wanted to change the name of the site from CompanyWeb to CyberText and I wanted to change the default logo to my company logo. You’d think that would be easy, right? Well, changing the name was simple, but not the logo.

So for anyone else struggling to figure out how to do this, here’s what I did to get it to work. Note: Your version of SharePoint may have slightly different screen shots and wording to those below.

Change SharePoint site name

1. On any page, click Site Actions in the top right.
2. Select Site Settings.
   
3. Click the Title, Description and Icon link.
   
4. Enter the new name in the Title field, then click OK.

That’s the easy bit. Changing the logo is not so easy…

Change logo

1. Repeat Steps 1 to 3 above, and leave Internet Explorer open at that page — you’ll come back to it in Step 7.
2. Find the image of the logo you want to use and either copy it or put it on a thumb drive.
3. Now, go to the server where SharePoint is installed. You may need your admin person to do this. I have my own server, so I just went in via Remote Desktop.
4. On the server, open Explorer (right-click on the Start button).
5. Navigate to C:/Program Files/Common Files/Microsoft Shared/Web Server Extensions/12/TEMPLATE/IMAGES. Please note: If you’re using SharePoint 2010, you will see a 14 folder instead of 12 — select 14.
   
6. Paste your logo into the IMAGES folder. You’re finished with the server now.
7. Go back to your PC and, in the URL field on the Title, Description and Icon page, type /_layout/images/<name of the image file you just pasted>
   
8. Click the Test link to make sure the logo displays, then click OK.
   

Thanks to Nik Patel for pointing me in the right direction: http://nikspatel.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/sharepoint-site-logo-url-limitations-site-pages-vs-web-part-pages/

It really shouldn’t be that hard! Why isn’t there a Browse button next to that field? Why can’t you insert an image object into SharePoint, then link to that object as the logo? Why do you have to copy the image file to a server location manually?

BTW, I don’t like CompanyWeb as the URL, but changing it looks like a nightmare for someone who isn’t a web admin person. Details here: http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2007/11/change-sharepoint-site-url.html

[Link last checked March 2011]