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:
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.
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.
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.
You can use the the Portal Samples for to change and view Look & Feel modifications. The Tutorial Portal also contains different Look & Feel implementations.
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
Adding Books and Pages to a Portal
Changing the Header and Footer