In our earlier post we got introduced to our new client Jet30, had our initial discussions and we came out with the initial home page/website design.

Before getting into the discussion of what would be our site columns, content types and page layouts, let us use this template, create a SharePoint master page and activate it on an existing publishing site and see whether it works. It is always better to go step-by-step than going down and creating everything at once (site definitions, page layouts etc.,). However, if you are quite familiar with this process, you might end up doing everything at once than going this way. But for now, let us build a Jet30 Master Page.

Create a Sample Publishing Site

Create a publishing site (with publishing site features enabled). The master page, style sheets will be deployed to this site for now.

[I created a site called http://jet-thirty]

SharePoint Development Tools Used

1) WSPBuilder

2) SPVisualDev

Building the Master Page

All master pages (and page layouts) reside in the Master Pages and Page Layouts list in the publis