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

This tutorial shows you how easy it is to modify the look and feel of a portal and modify the navigation style used for the portal pages. The tutorial takes about 10 minutes to complete.

## Tutorial Goals

At the end of this tutorial you will have changed the look and feel and page navigation style of a portal.

## Tutorial Overview

This tutorial involves modifying two elements of a portal's physical appearance and behavior: look and feel, and navigation.

The WebLogic Workshop Portal Extensions provide a flexible, extensible architecture for controlling the look and feel and page navigation in a portal. A portal look and feel is made up of a skin (graphics, a cascading style sheet, and JavaScript functions) and skeletons (JSP files that determine the rendering—the physical boundaries—of individual portal components, such as desktops, pages, and portlets).

Ultimately the look and feel of a portal, and its navigation style, are determined by the portal administrator and end users. All look and feel and navigation resources that are available to developers in the WebLogic Workshop Portal Extensions are also available to delegated administrators in the WebLogic Administration Portal and to end users in the Visitor Tools when the portal is put into production.

When an administrator creates a desktop based on a .portal file in the WebLogic Administration Portal, that portal is decoupled from the development environment and can be modified as needed by the administrator, and in turn by end users when the portal is put into production. The initial look and feel and navigation settings you provide in development serve as the default settings for portal administrators and end users. This tutorial merely shows how easy it is to change look and feel and navigation elements in the development environment.

## Steps in This Tutorial

Step 1: Start WebLogic Workshop, Open an Application, and Start WebLogic Server — 5 minutes

In this step you start WebLogic Workshop, open the sample portal application, and start WebLogic Server.

Step 2: Change the Portal Look and Feel and Navigation — 5 minutes

In this step you change a portal's look and feel and page navigation style.

Click the following arrow to navigate through the tutorial: