Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 gives developers a great degree of control over the look and feel of their site. I set out recently to figure out just exactly how much customization was possible, and what was practical. While the technical details are explained well elsewhere, high level, here's what I found:
Because SharePoint pages are just ASP.NET, you can customize them just as you would a standard ASP.NET 2.0 web page. Just to see how much I could do, I took my personal site and went crazy with layout and style changes. In this example, I modified only the master page for the site, adding new style declarations at the top and changing the HTML throughout.
Before:
...and after:
Unfortunately, this wasn't as easy as it could have been. Since working on the new Windows Marketplace, which we built using an entirely CSS-based layout, I'm used to having a lot more control over the UI by only modifying the styles. SharePoint's out-of-the-box pages use a traditional table-based layout, which increases the amount of time and hassle it takes to create a site as dramatically different as this one.