Enhancing your SharePoint Team Site Homepage

A team site can be a boring place. Just a site with some documents, a list or two, maybe a calendar. Here’s a super simple way to make the page a little more interesting looking.

Your team site might look like this right now, with a calendar on the home page:

Simple and effective but bland. Also the title just blends into the background doesn’t it?

Edit the web part and under Advanced settings, set the Title Icon Image URL to the same value as the Calendar Icon Image URL:

Now the calendar shows a small icon next to the title and breaks up the page a little.

Simple but easy to do. By default, the Title icon is blank but IMHO it should be defaulted to the type of list that’s being shown (Calendar, Task List, Document Library, etc.). Like I said, it’s simple but it breaks up the page and also is a visual reminder of what you’re looking at. It also shows where the clickable title is for a list or library that’s been put on a page. When you have a page full of web parts, it’s not immediately obvious where the title is in a sea of text. A little graphic goes a long way for readability.

You can use any icon for any list but I like using the one suited to the task. Here’s a list of the icons to use for each list/library type:

Enjoy!