SharePoint Site Design: How to Build Beautiful, Functional SharePoint Sites

Walk into a well-designed office and you feel it immediately. The space is organised. The signage is clear. Everything has a place, and you can find your way without asking anyone for help. The environment communicates something about the organisation that owns it — that it is professional, that it takes its culture seriously, that it cares about the experience of the people who work within it.

Your SharePoint intranet should do the same thing digitally. For the majority of UK office workers, SharePoint is the digital equivalent of the office space they inhabit. It is where they go to find information, access tools, read company news, and manage their working day. When SharePoint site design is done well, it reinforces trust, encourages adoption, and communicates organisational identity as powerfully as any physical space. When it is done badly — cluttered, inconsistent, visually incoherent, and difficult to navigate — it undermines confidence in the platform and, by extension, in the organisation that built it.

This guide is the most comprehensive treatment of SharePoint site design available for UK businesses. It covers the full spectrum — from the foundational principles of good design thinking, through the practical application of SharePoint’s design tools, to the governance and maintenance that keeps a SharePoint environment looking and working its best over time.


What Is SharePoint Site Design?

SharePoint site design refers to the visual, structural, and experiential design of SharePoint sites — the decisions that determine how a site looks, how it is organised, how users navigate it, and how effectively it communicates with its audience.

This encompasses a wide range of elements. Visual design — the colour palette, typography, imagery, and layout that give a SharePoint site its aesthetic character. Information design — the structure of pages, the organisation of content, and the hierarchy of information that guides users to what they need. Navigation design — the menus, links, and wayfinding mechanisms that allow users to move through the site efficiently. Interaction design — the web parts, forms, and functional elements that make the site useful rather than merely readable.

SharePoint site design is also — crucially — a governance concern. A SharePoint environment that is beautifully designed on launch day but has no design governance framework in place will drift towards inconsistency over time as different people add pages, change layouts, and introduce new content without reference to established design standards. Sustaining the quality of SharePoint site design is as important as achieving it in the first place.


Why SharePoint Site Design Matters More Than Most Organisations Realise

There is a tendency in SharePoint projects — particularly those led by IT rather than communications or digital teams — to treat design as secondary to function. The platform works. The content is there. The permissions are configured correctly. That is enough.

It is not enough. Here is why.

Design drives adoption. Employees do not use tools that feel difficult or uninspiring to use. A SharePoint site that is cluttered, inconsistently formatted, visually dated, and difficult to navigate will not be used — regardless of how well-organised its underlying content is. Research into enterprise software adoption consistently shows that perceived ease of use and aesthetic quality are significant predictors of whether employees adopt a platform habitually or avoid it. Design is not decorative — it is functional.

Design communicates organisational values. The quality of your SharePoint intranet communicates something about your organisation to everyone who uses it. An intranet that is well-designed, on-brand, and clearly invested in says that the organisation values its employees’ experience of work. An intranet that looks like it was built quickly by someone who had never used SharePoint before — all default blue headers and misaligned web parts — communicates something rather less flattering.

Design reduces cognitive load. Good design is design that you do not notice — because it presents information so clearly and navigates so intuitively that users can focus on the content rather than on the interface. Poor design increases cognitive load — users spend mental energy figuring out where to look, how to navigate, and what the most important information on the page is. Over dozens of daily interactions, this friction compounds into a significant drag on productivity.

Design supports findability. A well-designed page uses visual hierarchy to guide users to the most important content first. Clear headings, consistent formatting, purposeful use of colour and contrast, and logical layout all contribute to the ability of users to quickly identify and access what they came to the page for. A poorly designed page treats all content as equally important — which means none of it is.


The Principles of Effective SharePoint Site Design

Before diving into the specific tools and techniques of SharePoint site design, it is worth establishing the underlying principles that good SharePoint design is built on. These principles apply regardless of which specific design choices are made — they are the standards against which every design decision should be evaluated.

Purpose before aesthetics. Every design decision should serve the purpose of the site and the needs of its users. A beautiful hero image that pushes all useful content below the fold is not good design — it is good aesthetics at the expense of function. A colour scheme that reinforces brand identity but creates poor contrast between text and background is not good design — it is brand compliance at the expense of readability. Purpose always comes first.

Consistency over novelty. A consistent SharePoint environment — where every site uses the same colour palette, the same navigation patterns, the same page templates, and the same editorial conventions — is more usable than a varied one where every site looks different. Consistency reduces the cognitive effort required to navigate a new site within the same environment, because users can apply habits learned elsewhere. Novelty is engaging in consumer products. In workplace tools, it is friction.

Clarity over density. It is tempting to fill SharePoint pages with every piece of content that might conceivably be relevant. Resist this temptation. Pages that try to show too much show nothing well. Prioritise the content that matters most to the page’s primary audience and purpose, and leave the rest for secondary pages, document libraries, or search. White space is not wasted space — it is the breathing room that allows important content to be seen.

Mobile first, not mobile compatible. Designing for desktop first and then checking that it looks acceptable on mobile is not the same as designing for mobile first. The mobile experience of a SharePoint site should be a primary design consideration — particularly for organisations with field workers, frontline staff, or any employees who regularly access SharePoint away from a desktop environment. If a page design does not work well on a phone screen, it is not a good design.

Accessibility is non-negotiable. WCAG 2.1 AA compliance is the standard that UK public sector organisations are legally required to meet for their digital properties, and it is the right standard for all organisations to aspire to. In SharePoint site design terms, this means sufficient colour contrast between text and background, meaningful alt text on all images, logical heading hierarchy on all pages, keyboard-navigable interfaces, and forms that work with screen readers. Accessibility is not a constraint on design quality — it is a dimension of it.


SharePoint’s Design Tools — What You Have to Work With

Modern SharePoint Online provides a significantly richer set of design tools than earlier versions of the platform. Understanding what is available — and what its limitations are — is essential to making informed SharePoint site design decisions.

The Change the Look Panel

Every SharePoint site has a Change the Look settings panel that provides control over the site’s visual appearance. This includes:

Theme — SharePoint supports custom colour themes that apply a consistent colour palette across all web parts and interface elements on the site. Custom themes can be built using the SharePoint Theme Generator tool, which allows organisations to input their brand colours and generates a compatible SharePoint theme. Custom themes can be deployed across an entire SharePoint tenancy, ensuring consistent branding across all sites.

Header — The site header can be configured with a custom logo, a site name, and — for communication sites — a choice of header layout options including compact, minimal, and extended headers. The header background colour is controlled by the applied theme.

Navigation — The site’s navigation style can be configured as standard (with the site name and navigation in a horizontal bar), compact, or mega menu (which supports structured drop-down navigation panels for sites with more complex navigation requirements).

Footer — Communication sites support a site footer with configurable links — useful for adding secondary navigation, contact information, or legal links.

Web Parts

Web parts are the building blocks of SharePoint pages. Each web part serves a specific function, and combining them thoughtfully produces effective page layouts. The most useful web parts for SharePoint site design include:

The Hero web part displays up to five highlighted content items in a visually prominent layout. It is the most powerful visual element available in SharePoint and should anchor the home page of any communication site used as an intranet. The Hero web part supports image backgrounds, titles, descriptions, and links — giving it significant flexibility as a primary editorial element.

The News web part surfaces recently published news posts from the current site or from across a hub. It is essential for any site where news publishing is a primary activity and supports several layout options — top story, list, tiles, and carousel.

The Quick Links web part provides a configurable grid of links with icons, titles, and optional descriptions. It is the most effective way to surface frequently accessed resources on a page — HR forms, IT help links, policy documents, and external tools. The Quick Links web part supports multiple layout styles and custom icons.

The People web part displays profiles of named individuals with their photos, titles, and contact information. It is useful for team pages, leadership pages, and any context where putting faces to names matters for users.

The Events web part surfaces upcoming events from a SharePoint list, supporting calendar and film strip layouts. It is valuable for sites that manage events — training calendars, company event schedules, team meeting overviews.

The File Viewer web part embeds a document — a PDF, a PowerPoint presentation, a Word document — directly on a SharePoint page, allowing users to view it without downloading. It is useful for surfacing key documents on relevant pages rather than burying them in document libraries.

The Embed web part allows external content — a Power BI dashboard, a YouTube video, a Microsoft Forms form, a website — to be embedded directly on a SharePoint page. This is a powerful capability for integrating SharePoint with other Microsoft 365 tools, particularly Power BI.

SharePoint Site Templates

SharePoint provides a library of site templates that offer pre-built page structures and configurations for common use cases. Available templates include department sites, project sites, event sites, blog sites, and several others. These templates provide a useful starting point but should be customised — replacing placeholder content, adjusting navigation, applying brand colours and logos — before they are used in a live environment.

SharePoint Look Book

Microsoft maintains the SharePoint Look Book — a gallery of design examples showing what modern SharePoint can look like when well designed. The Look Book is an invaluable reference point for understanding what is achievable with SharePoint’s native design tools, and for communicating design ambition to stakeholders who have only seen default SharePoint. It is available at lookbook.microsoft.com.

SharePoint Site Scripts and Site Designs

For organisations with multiple SharePoint sites that need to maintain consistent design standards — or for SharePoint administrators who want to automate the application of branding and configuration to newly created sites — SharePoint site scripts and site designs are a powerful governance tool.

A site script is a JSON file that defines a series of actions to be applied to a SharePoint site — applying a theme, setting a logo, adding navigating links, creating lists, or configuring other site settings. A site design packages one or more site scripts and applies them automatically when a new site is created using a specified template. This means that every new HR site created in your tenancy automatically gets the HR branding, the standard HR navigation, the HR document libraries, and the HR permission groups — without requiring the site creator to configure any of this manually.


Designing the Home Page

The home page is the most important single page in any SharePoint site, and it deserves a disproportionate share of design attention. It is the first thing users see, the primary navigational hub for the site, and the page that most powerfully communicates the quality and purpose of the environment.

A well-designed SharePoint home page structure typically follows this pattern.

The header zone — hero or banner. The top of the home page should be occupied by a visually strong element that orients users to the site’s identity and surfaces the most important or most recent content. For an intranet, this is typically a Hero web part featuring the top news story or a featured piece of content alongside the organisation’s branding. The hero establishes the visual tone of the entire page.

The quick access zone. Immediately below the hero, a Quick Links web part provides direct access to the most frequently used resources. This is the most functionally important area of the home page — the place where users come to find the HR portal, the IT help desk, the expenses form, the holiday booking system, and other daily-use tools. Keep this section focused on genuine high-traffic destinations — not everything that might conceivably be useful.

The news zone. A News web part surfaces recent company or departmental news. This keeps the home page fresh — a new visitor always sees current content — and drives engagement with the organisation’s internal communications. The layout of the News web part should be chosen to match the volume of news being published — a top story layout works well for sites with frequent publication; a tiles layout works better for less frequent publishers.

The people zone. A People web part featuring key contacts — the IT help desk team, the HR team, department leads, or the leadership team — gives users a direct way to connect with the people most likely to be able to help them. For organisations where knowing who to contact is a frequent challenge, this is a high-value addition to the home page.

The events zone. An Events web part surfaces upcoming company or department events, keeping the home page relevant to what is happening in the organisation right now rather than just serving as a static directory.

The links zone. Additional Quick Links or Text web parts at the bottom of the home page can surface secondary resources — department sites, external tools, compliance links — that do not merit a place in the primary quick access zone but are useful to have accessible from the home page.


Designing Department and Team Sites

Department and team sites are the secondary layer of a SharePoint intranet — the destinations that employees navigate to when they need something specific from a particular function of the business. Good department site design is different from home page design — it prioritises depth and organisation over visual impact.

A well-designed department site home page includes a clear purpose statement — a short text section that orients visitors to what the department site contains and what they will find there. This is particularly valuable for employees who arrive from search results and may not be familiar with the site.

A Quick Links section surfaces the most-accessed resources specific to this department — the forms, templates, policy documents, and tools that regular visitors come for most often. A News or Events section keeps the site current and communicates that it is actively maintained. A People section featuring the department team with contact information and roles makes it easy to reach the right person.

Document library design on department sites deserves specific attention. Libraries should be named clearly — not “Documents” but “HR Policies,” “Finance Templates,” or “IT Procedures.” Metadata columns should be applied consistently — document type, status, owner, review date — enabling filtering and search. Folder use should be minimal — a flatter structure with metadata-based filtering is more findable than deeply nested folders.


Navigation Design Across the SharePoint Environment

Navigation is the skeleton of any SharePoint environment. Users who cannot find what they need efficiently will not use the platform — regardless of how good the content is or how attractive the design.

Global navigation — available in SharePoint tenancies with Microsoft 365 E3 or above, or via Viva Connections — appears consistently across all SharePoint sites and surfaces the most important destinations in the entire environment. It should be limited to six to eight items covering the home, the main hub sites, and a small number of critical tools. Global navigation items should be chosen based on what employees access most frequently, not based on organisational hierarchy.

Hub navigation applies across all sites associated with a hub. It surfaces the sites and pages within that hub’s scope, providing consistent wayfinding for everyone working within a particular area — the Finance hub, the HR hub, the Operations hub. Hub navigation should be designed to reflect the information architecture of the hub rather than defaulting to a list of every site within it.

Site-level navigation is local to each site and surfaces the pages and resources within that site. It should be purposeful — organised by user task rather than by content category — and kept to a manageable number of items. Navigation labels should be written in plain language that makes sense to the user, not in the internal jargon that content creators may default to.


Maintaining Design Quality Over Time

The most significant challenge in SharePoint site design is not achieving a high standard at launch — it is maintaining that standard over time as content is added by multiple authors, sites are extended by different teams, and the platform evolves through Microsoft updates.

Design governance is the answer. A SharePoint design governance framework defines the standards that every page on the platform should meet — the approved colour palette, the authorised web parts, the page templates that should be used for different content types, the image dimensions and style guidelines, the editorial conventions for headings and body text. It assigns responsibility for enforcing these standards — typically to a named intranet owner or digital workplace team — and establishes the process by which new page designs are reviewed before publication.

Site templates and page templates are governance tools as much as they are design tools. When a new department site is created using an approved site template, it automatically inherits the correct branding, navigation structure, and page layouts. When a new news article is created using a standardised news template, it follows the established format rather than starting from a blank canvas that the author can design in any direction they choose.

Periodic design reviews — assessing the visual quality and consistency of SharePoint sites on a scheduled basis, typically annually or biannually — catch design drift before it becomes pervasive. These reviews identify pages that have deviated from standards, web parts that have been misused, and navigation that has grown organically beyond what was intended.

Author training is the final piece. Content authors who understand the design standards and the reasons behind them make better design decisions when they publish new content. Training should cover not just how to use SharePoint’s authoring tools but what good looks like — showing examples of well-designed pages alongside less successful ones and explaining the principles that distinguish them.


Working with NetMonkeys on SharePoint Site Design

NetMonkeys brings a design-first approach to SharePoint that many IT-focused consultancies do not. We believe that SharePoint site design is as important as any other aspect of a SharePoint project — and our team combines Microsoft platform expertise with genuine design capability to deliver SharePoint environments that are both technically excellent and visually compelling.

Our SharePoint site design service covers brand application, custom theme development, home page design, department site templates, navigation design, mobile optimisation, and accessibility compliance.


Conclusion

SharePoint site design is not decoration. It is the layer of any SharePoint project that determines whether employees use the platform with confidence and satisfaction, or use it reluctantly and occasionally when they have no other option. It is the expression of organisational culture and values in digital form. And it is a sustained discipline — not a one-time effort — that requires governance, maintenance, and ongoing attention to remain effective.

The SharePoint environments that UK businesses are proudest of — the ones that get high adoption rates, positive employee feedback, and genuine engagement with company news and communications — are almost always the ones where design was taken seriously from the beginning. The ones that struggle are almost always the ones where design was treated as secondary to function, or not considered at all.

Get the design right. NetMonkeys can help you do exactly that.