One of the things that everyone wants to do before they deploy SharePoint is to customize it to their business. SharePoint 2013 makes customization and design easy. It’s even easier with SharePoint 2013 Designer. If you don’t have SharePoint Designer, you can download it for free from Microsoft.

For this walkthrough SharePoint guide, I will be customizing my site to better match our business SharePoint Hoster. Step 1 is to upload our SharePoint Hoster logo to our SharePoint site. Some site templates have an easy to use bottom right on their homepage:

If you’ve hidden this button or it’s not on your homepage, don’t fear! You can always access the logo, title and description of your site via the site settings menu:

Click the gear in the top-right corner and then click site settings:

Under Look and Feel, click Title, description and logo.

Now we want to upload a new logo from our computer, so I will click the “From Computer” link.

Now we just have to click the choose file button, find our logo, and click OK a few times to get our new logo onto our SharePoint 2013 Hosting site.

Tada!

Now the next step is to change the SharePoint theme and customize the colors and look. This is really easy, just click the the change the look button.

There are a ton of themes to choose from and I like the look of “City” so I’m going to select that sharepoint 2013 theme template to start.

I love the font and background of these theme, but I’m going to take some times to adjust the colors and site layout. When you’ve fiddled with all the option and want to see a live preview, click the Try It button. You will then get a live preview of your SharePoint 2013 hosted site and can decide to keep the changes or go back and tweak them even further. When you’ve got your site looking spiffy, click keep it.

There you have it! an awesome customized SharePoint 2013 hosted site. Stay tuned for more tutorials and guides, or let us know what questions/tutorials you need below.