7.1. What Are SharePoint Themes?
A Theme is a collection of style sheets and images packaged together. Themes are used as a lightweight mechanism to brand Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)-based sites after they have been provisioned. The styles sheets in a Theme override the styles in the default Theme originally applied to the site. Once the Theme is applied, it takes over the look and feel of all the pages within a site. New pages that are created after a Theme is applied inherit the styles in the Theme. There are 18 Themes that come with WSS. An end user with the designer or higher privilege on a site can effortlessly apply a SharePoint Theme using the browser. More information is presented on the Themes that come with WSS and how to apply them in the upcoming sections.
Master Pages (covered in chapters 5 and 8) can be used in tandem with style sheets to change the look and feel of a site. So why are Themes needed? Master Pages are very powerful and can change more than the look and feel of a site. They can change, among other things, positioning of the elements on a page, such as the navigation component, header, and footer of a site. You can define your own new classes in a Master Page and use style sheets to brand them. Check out these Internet sites based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) that make use of Master Pages to drastically change the layout of their pages:
