Bogged Down in Branding

So the Sharepoint project rages on...with very little in-house knowledge of the platform. Programmers, writers, designers, UI team--none of us quite have the background we need to really make Sharepoint sing. So we've been training and reading and working with experts to get it right.

One thing I learned early on and have now seen the true benefit of is that Branding must be an integral part of all phases of design. If your web team is like mine, you know that getting the IT "functional" thinkers to work with the UI "experience" guys can be difficult.

But with Sharepoint, as with any successful web project, all the details should be worked through with the big picture in mind.

You have a new form that needs five new fields? Why? How should they be set up? What controls need to be used to validate the data? All these types of questions should be answered both within the functional capabilities of the team and the platform (i.e. What web parts are we using?) AND within the usability vision of the UI team.

By maintaining a cohesive working environment, nothing will be left behind. Get all of the concerns out and discussed for each functional area of the site at one time with the help of the WHOLE team. Working together allows web parts to be defined, user flow to be established, functionality to be built and branding to be determined all at once so the team can truly see where the project is going and, more importantly, WHY.

Trust this, if you don't consider Branding (which is often the usability portion) through out the process, the end product will not be what the USER expected.