Customizing SharePoint's look and feel can be very tedious and time consuming. But, there are some important tools that you should be aware of that make it a lot easier!

The first tool you should consider are the SP Master Starter pages that are available on <a href="http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com" target="_blank">CodePlex</a>.  These starter pages have comments throughout the code that tell you exactly what each section is used for and what it does.  This is <em>extremely</em> useful and a <em>lot</em> easier than using the OOB master pages!

Another tool that ties in nicely with the Starter Master pages is this <a href="http://sharepointexperience.com/csschart/csschart.html" target="_blank">CSS Chart</a>.  This will help immensly when overriding the core CSS styles.  It will list all of the styles, tell you what they are used for, and give you a nice override key that you can use in your own CSS file.

No designer or developer would have a complete toolbox unless they had the IE F12 Developer Tools or the <a href="http://getfirebug.com" target="_blank">FireBug</a> plugin for Firefox.  Both of these tools will allow you to select elements on a page and see the code behind them.  Not only that, but FireBug will allow you to make inline changes to CSS styles and see the changes in real-time.  This is a <em>huge</em> time saver!

So there you have it.  These are the 3 main tools that I use whenever I