Default Header and Navigation on My Sites and Search Center

For reasons unbeknownst to me and other SharePoint practitioners the Microsoft team decided not to include the site collection navigation as well as the large header above it (contains site logo, title and description as well as the social buttons) in My Sites and the enterprise search center. I’m not going to go on about why I think this was a poor decision, but I wanted to provide you with master pages for both that establish consistency.

The process was simple. I just had to find the code that created the header and navigation and include it in the out-of-the-box master pages for My Sites and the search center (called mysite.master and minimal.master respectively). The search center will then look exactly like v4.master in the header region. The My Site master page has the custom bar above the ribbon, and you’ll notice the site collection title, site title and description are not in the header. The reason for that is that the mysite.master uses those placeholders elsewhere in the master page. For the sake of sticking with the out-of-the-box design I’ve kept the content placeholders where they were designated in mysite.master.

You can then add your custom CSS and JavaScript to the master page as well as any other changes you wish to do. It will at least give you a start on interface consistency between the three major aspects of the SharePoint interface. The ZIP file contains both master pages including a text file with the code I placed into each of the master pages for reference.

Download Master Pages