Hey everyone! So you're at work and you've just been told you need to build a SharePoint intranet page. And you just go like what? Because, let's face it, not everyone knows how to do that. That's okay. That's what I'm here to show you today in this tutorial. We're going to build a page like this. It looks pretty good and it's not very hard at all. In fact, it's mostly just click a few buttons, drag and drop, that's it. So today I'll talk you through the basic building blocks of a SharePoint page. I'm going to talk you through how to layout your text and images so that it's easy for your audience to read and consume the information that you're wanting to give them. And I'm also going to show you a few tricks to make your page look a little bit more interesting without going completely over the top. So let's just get stuck right into it! Welcome to the HR website. This is where we are going to build our very first SharePoint page. The first thing to talk through before we get going with building the actual page is permissions. Now, you don't always have permission to do everything you want on any SharePoint internet site. If you are, say, an editor for your HR department you're not going to have access to edit pages on other intranet sites within your organization. So the first thing to look for is whether you can see this bar here where you have the option to edit, and you have the option to make something new. Now, because we're going to make a page, and we can see the new button, and we can see that you have the option to make a new page here, we're all good to get started. These other options like lists, document libraries, news posts and such... We'll cover those in a separate tutorial later on. So, for now I just want you to go and click the page option. Clicking the page option will bring up some suggested templates that you can use to get started. These two here visual and basic text come pre-installed with SharePoint, but if your company has added some templates of its own, you will see them above the built in ones here. I don't find these two templates very useful. They don't generally marry up with what I want to do anyways. I'm going to start all the way from scratch so that I can show you every step on the way of building your first SharePoint page. A page on SharePoint is made up of four things. Tt's made up of a header, which can be with or without a banner image. The header also includes a page title and a contact card showing who made the page. Note that you can also change that to someone else in your company. It also contains sections. They are sort of like the big-picture building blocks. They span the whole page and you can add sections on top of each other and below each other. When you look out to the side here you can see there's a plus here for adding a new section above the current one and you can also add a new section below it. Sections themselves contain columns they're the third building block of the page. You can have one two or three columns per section, so when you're in a section you can tweak it by using these four buttons on the right... On the left rather (the other right) from top to bottom they are edit section, move section, duplicate section and delete section. So when you click on edit section you bring out a pane on the right here, which lets you tweak the layout of that section. So, if I click on three columns here, you'll see straight away that it brings up three columns within that section, where I can add content. I can also tweak the background of the section, just clicking on the color that I want. I can make it a very solid color, a softer color, I can make it light gray, or we can take it back to white again. Next, we'll skip move for now and we'll go to duplicate, which pretty much just duplicates whatever you have in that section in a new section. That's very handy if you have a layout that you want to keep reusing, like images on one side and text on the other. Just duplicate it and plop in new text and images. If you want to use the move button to move a section up or down the page, that's very easy. Just click and drag it up and it goes. Now that didn't show very well, so I'll type something in here just to show you. Again, I'll grab the move section button and drag it down to the bottom of the page, and i's very obvious now that it has moved. The fourth button is delete section. So, web parts being the fourth building block of a page, they're what you're going to be spending the most time playing with. You have a few very important web parts like text, images, links, highlighted content, as well as embedding code, as well as a file viewer. In this tutorial, we're only going to be playing with text and images, but there are all these other ones as well that you can use, like a kindle instant preview (I'm not sure exactly when that would be relevant for us...) as well as many other things like videos. You can embed videos directly from YouTube or from Stream, which is the Microsoft corporate version of YouTube. You can put in weather forecasts, you can pop in maps, you can also put in things like for example countdowns. I can't see that one at the moment, so aside from scrolling through and finding it, I can also type into the search field up here for example, and that'll show me the countdown timer. I'm going to go back out here. So that was the four - those WERE rather - the four building blocks for SharePoint pages. Your header, your sections, your columns and your web parts. Now I'm going to start with tweaking the header to look the way I want it. You can actually put in an image here in this banner. Say I clicked the change image button out here, that'll give me a few options like adding a stock image that has been pre-picked and that I'm free to use. So I'm going to use this person in the rain here. Once you put in a banner image you can then drag and set a focal point. A focal point is the one spot in your image that you would always want to have shown, regardless of what device you are on and regardless of the format of the image - or the aspect ratio, rather. For example, now that I've dragged the focal point out to here, SharePoint will always try to show her face even if it's just a very small thumbnail. If I'm not entirely happy with that focal point, I can go out here to the buttons and click the set image focal point button, and I can tweak it slightly. You also have the option here to reset to the default image. Clicking that will take this away and you'll be left with a placeholder image again. The reason I did reset it, is that headers on content pages - basically, you know, just pages containing text and a few images - I wouldn't advise you to use banners for those. They take up too much space. They take away attention from the main thing that you want to get through, so I'm going to go and tweak this header so that we don't have a banner in the first place. Whenever you need to edit something like a web part, or a column or a section, you'll see that there's a little pencil. Clicking on the pencil here in the header brings up this title area pane over on the right, and I can select different layouts for my header. I didn't actually want an banner at all, so I'm just going to click on plain. That removes the banner image altogether and I can just stick with a page title and an author card. There we go, so what I just typed in now is the page title and the page title also gets turned into the URL of the page up here. Once I click outside of the page title, eventually the URL will update to show three ways to make working in the rain more enjoyable. Do try to get the title right the first time you type it in. Otherwise, once you've hit save as draft once, that URL will not update anymore and there's another step you have to do to change the URL. I've set a descriptive title for my page and I am the author of the page, so I'm going to leave my contact card here for now and then we'll get straight into adding text and images. When you start with a blank page, there will always be a text web part there for you, which you can put stuff in. I'm going to go and grab some placeholder text here from Lorem Ipsum and I'm going to paste that in. Here we go. So now I have text on my page. Aside from that we're going to put in an image as well. What we do is, we go and add an image web part. We might try first to add an image on top of the text. I'm going to click on the plus button above the text here and you'll see that image is the second web part in the list, so I'll click on that and that'll straight away bring up this image selection menu where I can pick either something recent that I've already uploaded to the site - there isn't anything at the moment - so I'm going to move on to the next option, which is stock images. You shouldn't use too many stock images on your intranet site. Try to use actual images taken by your company. They will align better with the company brand and you won't run the risk of your site ending up looking like some generic stock photo site. But for the purpose of this tutorial we'll do that anyway. We'll use something to do with rain because this is a page about making working in the rain more enjoyable. That looks rather enjoyable doesn't it? The yellow umbrella in a sea of black umbrellas... So I'm going to click and select that image and then I'm going to click the insert button. That pops in the image on top of the text, and by default it spans the whole column. When you put in images in SharePoint, you have a few options to tweak them. You have an option up here to resize the image. It basically lets you drag the image to make it smaller. I don't recommend using that option too much because your page will end up looking messy if you have different images with different width. It is difficult to make the width exactly the way you want it every time, so you are better off leaving it to span the full width of the page or - sorry - the full width of the column and then we'll do something else instead to make the page look a bit better. The next option you have is cropping. So if you're not too happy with the composition of the image you can cut off a little bit of the image, for example at the bottom here, and take off a little bit more at the top as well, so that it turns into more of a banner type image. Once you're happy with that, you click outside and SharePoint crops it for you. The next option here is aspects ratios. That has to do with the cropping as well, so it was free ratio at the moment but you can set 16:9 ratio on other things as well so that when you crop it'll stick to for example a 3:2 ratio. The next one over here is alignment, so if I had the image resized and then I wanted to have the image stick to the left, I click the align left button. And here you go, but again, like I said, it doesn't always look so great when you have an image that doesn't take up the full column... I'm going to put it back up again - just bear with me - because overall this image takes up a lot of space and a lot of attention where, what you really want people to do, is read the content of the page. So we're going to edit this section and we're going to make it into two columns: one for text and one for image. I generally find that a one-third right setup works best for this. That leaves your text and image now in the same column. But see how there's a move icon for my mouse pointer? I can grab and drag that into the new column that I just made. That puts my image over here on the right and it just sticks to the top of the column, and the text also comes up to the top. That looks a bit better. The benefit of using this sort of setup as well is that the text isn't as wide as it was before, so the eye doesn't have to travel as far when the reader reads this page. It means they can generally get through the text faster. You could also change the column width to two columns. In terms of actually formatting your text, you might not just want to have one big bunch of text here with no headings or anything, so I'll show you how to do that. it's very much like working in, say, Word. You click on the text, that'll bring up a little formatting bar at the top here where you can do things like bolding, italicizing, underlining text. You can select whether a paragraph is going to be aligned left, right or center, and you can also make bulleted lists and numbered lists. You can also add hyperlinks and, if that's not enough for you, you can click on ... here, which brings up this pane on the right again, which will give you more options like strikethrough text, superscript, subscript, clearing formatting, you can set custom font size and colors, and you can even insert tables. For example, if I want to add a bit of bold here, I just highlight the text I want and click bold. That's all it is. One thing that I really would like to drive home to you is: when you make intranet pages, you need to make them readable. If you look on any website out there, it generally has a lot of content on each page, but it's all laid out so that it's easy for you to read. Go and look at news websites for example. They have short paragraphs, they have subheadings, they have images and everything, so that it's easy for you - the reader - to quickly get the content that you need, understand what it's about, take away what you need, and spend the least amount of time doing so. I'm going to show you how you can break this page up - I mean, admittedly this is placeholder text, but it doesn't really matter because just looking at it you will get the idea... I'm going to break it up so that we have shorter paragraphs - ideally two or three sentences at most per paragraph. Even one sentence per paragraph works, depends on what you are going for. I'm going to go with two or three lines of text per paragraph. that makes it nice and easy to read. Aside from having shorter paragraphs you will also want to use subheadings as much as possible. I'm going to make a few of those, so let's pretend this is a subheading. Up here, where it says normal text, you can click on that and you have options for making a heading 1, heading 2 and heading 3. Generally on internet and intranet pages, the title of the page is H1 or heading 1. You mostly only want one heading 1 on the page, so we're going to go with heading 2 instead. I'm going to go and click heading 2, and now that formats this paragraph or line of text as a heading 2. I'm going to make a few more of those, so here as well that's a very important subheading... So I'm going to format that up for us. That could be another subheading, so again click up here and hit heading 2. Already the page is starting to look a bit easier to read. You don't have too many paragraphs just running into each other. You have subheadings that break the page up and also give you a bit of an idea of what the next few paragraphs are all about. Another thing to do is making bullet point lists. So when you have for example three ways to make working in the rain more enjoyable, you might actually want a little bullet point list to show those three ways. So let's turn this into one of those. I'm going to make a numbered list here. Simply click on numbered list. That puts a 1. in front of the paragraph. Now I'm going to go here and put in a line break. That turns it into another dot point. Then I'm going to put another line break here, that turns it into a third dot point. The page is starting to look pretty good. There you go. If ever you want to sort of stop and look at what you're doing without all these distracting buttons around, just click on save as draft. That'll take the page out of editing mode but without actually publishing it. You can scroll down and see what you've been doing. I'm going to go back into edit mode and I'm going to take this yet another step further. So one thing you could consider doing, is bolding your intro paragraph just to really make that stand out. If you don't want to bold it you can make a pull quote out of it instead. In the normal text, go and select pull quote. That turns it into this sort of bordered paragraph with bigger italicized text. Once again we'll click save draft to see what we're looking at. Yeah, not bad... But there's more we can do. Remember where I said we could have multiple sections on a page? I'll show you what that might look like. Let's say that this here would be great in its own section in a single column across the whole page. We'll go and add a section up here on top, and when you click on that plus sign, you get the option of what sort of columns you want. We just want one column for that, and we're going to put in a text web part, because what I'm going to do is, I'm going to cut and paste this text. I'm going to put in a text web part right here, click the plus, click on text, then I'm going to go and cut this out... Right click cut, or you can go Ctrl X... Pop it up here and CTRL V. It didn't actually cut, so I will delete that and I'm going to go normal text. I'm going to delete that... That removed the formatting but that's okay - it's quick and easy to turn that back into a heading 2. See, there we have a one-column section of text and then the next section here has two columns - one with text, and one with an image. Now, what you can do to add a bit of interest to your page is, you can pop in another section with two columns. But we'll swap it around, so the text and image are on opposidte sides. So I just added a column here with two columns... Sorry, I added a section here with two columns. I'm going to put in a text web part here. I'm going to right click and paste that, and then I'm going to go and plop in an image again. You can go and upload your own image from the computer, but for this exercise we're just going to use stock images. So let's find another rain image. (It's a bit interesting how it only shows a few images, and the results come back differently every time... I don't know why, Microsoft, but hey...) We'll insert this one - that looks nice. All of a sudden the page is looking a lot more interesting. Another thing we can do up here to give this area a bit more emphasis, is to change the background color. Click on the edit section button here. That brings out the section background options, and we can set a different color. I'm going to go with this big, strong, green background color, which will also turn the text white to preserve contrast. That looks pretty good, but I'm not too sure about this pull quote after all, so I'm going to turn it back into normal text. And there you go! This box here could be useful for the most important information... A TL;DR, or too-long-didn't-read section, so that if people don't read the whole page, if they only just read this bit up here, they still get the gist of the page and they've sort of at least walked away with most of the knowledge that you wanted to impart. I'm going to save this as a draft again now and have a scroll through. that looks like a pretty good page, I think, although I'm not sure where my image went. That's weird... Here we go... I'm going to refresh that page and see what happens. Here we go, so now you have two sections - sorry - here you have three sections: Your intro, your text-on-left image-on- right, and your image-on- left, text-on-right. We can get a bit more creative with background colors, so that aside from making the section swap text from right to left, we can also pop in a bit of a soft background color, just to make it look even nicer. I just hit the publish button kind of by accident, but that's okay... We were ready to publish! When you do hit publish, the page goes live. When you do that, you get a few options over here, which would be to add your page to navigation, post it as a news story on this site, you can email it to someone, or you can save that page as a template. What you see here depends on what your organization has enabled. The last one here is your page address, which is the direct URL that you type up here to get to the page. You can copy that and shoot off an email to whoever you want, and say that you've made this awesome new page. I'm going to close this column again and have a look, and that's what the page is looking like now. So there you go! You've just made your first SharePoint intranet page. Do you have any questions or feedback? Let me know in the comments below. And it would really help if you could hit the subscribe button as well. Thanks everyone!
