Colour Coding SharePoint 2013 Central Admin Appearance Using Themes

A quick post I'd like to share as I am sure this can be useful for a lot of SharePoint admins.

As you are all probably aware you can change the theme of any SharePoint site from site settings.

Within Central Administration this option just leads to a blank theme gallery.

A problem I face regularly is having multiple server sessions open which include multiple farm central administration pages.

Sometimes I may have Production, Staging and Development Central Administration sessions open while testing and deploying through the environments.

By colour coding these environments it becomes quickly obvious which farm you are now in, and reduces your risk of making a mistake of which environment you are working in.

In my scenario I could also be working on different regional farms, so UK, USA and Asia all have a Production, Staging and Development.... you can forgive the confusion at busy times.

As I said a short and sweet tip that may be of interest to some administrators.

You can also label your Central Adminstration within the top banner and below is a great blog post covering that in detail.

http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-2013-central-administration-productivity-tip

Default colour scheme (Notice the 'Production' label at the top).

To access the themes simply take your Central Admin URL - http://server1:2013/default.aspx

and replace the /default.aspx with /_layouts/15/designgallery.aspx

 http://server1:2013/_layouts/15/designgallery.aspx

Choose a theme to suit this environment and save.

So now I have blue for Production and Orange for Staging, nice and easy to differentiate in a hurry.

Thanks for reading,

Matt