# Changing Look & Feel

The physical appearance of a portal is determined by the Look & Feel selected for the portal desktop. Look & Feels are a combination of skins, themes, and skeletons that control the structure, portlet titlebar graphics, JavaScript behavior, and HTML styles in your portal desktops.

You can change a the Look & Feel of an entire desktop or of individual components in the desktop in the following ways:

- Select a Look & Feel for the desktop
- Apply Themes to Books, Pages, and Portlets
- Override Style Sheet Classes and Styles on individual components

To select a Look & Feel for the desktop

Selecting a Look & Feel for a desktop provides a uniform Look & Feel to all components in the desktop.

1. With the portal file open, select the Desktop icon in the Document Structure window.
2. In the Property Editor window, select a different Look & Feel in the Look and Feel field.
3. Save the portal file.

To apply themes to books, pages, and portlets

Themes are subsets of skins and skeletons. They can contain their own graphics, cascading style sheets, and JavaScript behavior, and they can provide skeleton JSPs that render components differently than the parent skeleton JSPs. Themes can be applied to books, pages, and portlets.

While you can select an available theme for any book, page, or portlet, the theme will only render if the skin and/or skeleton for the selected look & feel contains the necessary theme subdirectory and files to make the theme work.

For more information, see Creating Skins and Skin Themes and Creating Skeletons and Skeleton Themes.

1. With the portal file open, select a book, page, or portlet.
2. In the Property Editor, select a theme in the Theme field.
3. Save the portal file.

To override style sheet classes and styles on individual components

You can manually override style sheet classes and styles on individual portal components using the Property Editor window.

1. With the portal file open, use the Document Structure window to select the component you want.
2. In the Property Editor window, enter the class and style values you want in the Presentation Class and Presentation Style fields. See the Properties for Portal Components reference topic for more information.
3. Save the portal file.

## Samples

You can use the the Portal Samples for to change and view Look & Feel modifications. The Tutorial Portal also contains different Look & Feel implementations.

Related Topics

How Look and Feel Determines Rendering

Tutorial: Changing a Portal's Look & Feel and Navigation

Creating Look & Feel Resources

Creating Skins and Skin Themes

Creating Skeletons and Skeleton Themes

Creating a Portal File

Adding Books and Pages to a Portal

Changing a Page Layout

Setting up Navigation

Changing the Header and Footer