Create Standout SharePoint Sites with Beacon Design

Turn standard pages into fully branded, engaging intranet experiences – without new platforms or custom code.

Branded SharePoint Design Made Easy

If you own internal communications, you know when intranet pages feel flat.

Beacon Design gives you a set of ready-made web parts and branding tools inside SharePoint so you can design modern, accessible pages in minutes, using the platform you already have.

What is Beacon Design?

Beacon Design is Silicon Reef’s intranet design accelerator. It’s a simple, powerful component suite that helps busy teams create well-designed SharePoint pages in minutes. No designers or developers required.

With advanced web parts and branding controls, Beacon Design makes your intranet look and feel like a custom website – while still behaving like SharePoint behind the scenes.

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Runs entirely in Microsoft 365 as a SharePoint Framework (SPFx) solution – no extra platform to log into or manage

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Enhances SharePoint’s out-of-the-box pages with richer layouts, visuals and components, instead of replacing them

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Built to be used day-to-day by internal comms, HR, and site owners – not just IT.

An example of a branded SharePoint homepage built using Beacon Design.

Our Beacon Clients

I’ve been working as a SharePoint developer for 17 years, and it’s the first time I’ve seen something that I can see how it’ll make my life easier.

Dorie Stewart

Senior Business Analyst, Warner Bros. Discovery

It was a pleasure to work with Silicon Reef. Silicon Reef’s Beacon software to lift the out-of-the-box features has been an unexpected and very welcome bonus.

Chris Hewitt

Head of Internal Communications, University of Leeds

It feels modern and swish. The search function has been fab – people love being able to search across the whole site and intranet.

Jo Trainor

Internal Communications & Marketing Assistant, Sport England

Key Features

Branding & Layout

Branding Customiser

Lock in your organisation’s fonts, colour palette and logo so every site, section and component feels recognisably “you”.

Magazine Style Layouts

Go beyond standard SharePoint sections with flexible layouts that support feature areas, multiple columns and more editorial style pages.

Section Backgrounds & Layouts

Apply coloured or image backgrounds, gradients or subtle patterns and custom borders to create visual structure, including options like parallax scrolling backgrounds where appropriate.

Paralax scrolling background

Custom borders

Content Presentation

Showcase Banner

A large hero banner for page headers, launches or announcements, with image or video background, overlay text and CTA buttons.

Content Highlight

Automatically pull through the latest news or documents from selected libraries and display them as modern cards or carousels.

Content Spotlight

Manually pick key pages or links to feature as cards, tabs or carousels for “top tasks” or curated content.

Image Hotspots

Create interactive images with clickable hotspots for org charts, office maps or process diagrams.

Rich Content

Structure dense content into tabs, accordions or multi column layouts, perfect for FAQs, policies and knowledge pages that need to stay scannable.

Content highlight

Image hotspots

Rich content

Accessibility & Governance Tools

Accessibility Checker

Evaluates colour combinations and layouts, indicating whether they meet WCAG AA or AAA contrast standards and prompting changes where needed.

Inclusive Templates & Presets

Page structures and styles that follow good practice for headings, readability and responsiveness as standard.

Governed Style Choices

Editors pick from an approved palette rather than freestyling colours and fonts, keeping everything on brand without manual policing.

Accessibility checker & brand centre

How Much Does Beacon Cost?

Every organisation is different, so Beacon pricing depends on things like your number of employees and which Beacon tools you’d like to use. Answer a few quick questions to get a cost outline.

Request Pricing

Client Stories

Unified Digital Workplace for a Global Renewable Energy Leader

A modern Microsoft 365 intranet connecting international teams, eases access to information and supports a vibrant company culture

Empowering Higher Education Comms

A new branded intranet with custom page templates for the University of Leeds.

7 Day Intranet Transformation

A brand-aligned design refresh for financial services firm TP ICAP.

See What’s Possible with Beacon

Beacon comes to life once you see what it can do. Browse some examples of SharePoint page designs created with Beacon to see the kinds of intranet experiences you could create.

Explore Beacon Designs

Who is Beacon For?

Beacon Design is for the people who live in SharePoint day in, day out – the internal comms teams shaping messages and the IT teams keeping everything running smoothly. It gives communicators more freedom to design great intranet experiences, and gives IT a governed, supportable way to extend what SharePoint can do.

Benefits for Internal Communications

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Tell better stories on the intranet – Use hero banners, rich layouts, accordions and media to bring campaigns, strategy and culture to life.

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Make important news impossible to miss – From homepage takeovers to alert banners, Beacon helps you put critical announcements front and centre.

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Real autonomy with page design – No more waiting on IT for layout tweaks or custom code – editors drag in web parts and configure them in a friendly pane.

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Keep everything on brand and accessible by default – Branding rules and accessibility checks guide editors as they build.

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Reuse proven page patterns – Turn successful layouts into templates, so new campaigns and updates are quicker to spin up and more consistent.

Benefits for IT & M365 Teams

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Built on Microsoft’s supported framework (SPFx) – Runs entirely in your tenant, using your existing security, permissions and compliance model.

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Reduces bespoke intranet development – A supported library of components maintained externally, instead of custom code you have to own.

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Gives business users safe autonomy – Comms and site owners can self serve within guardrails, cutting down on low value layout requests.

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Provides a governed, supportable baseline – Branding, accessibility and layout rules are enforced through configuration

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Acts as a ‘jumping off point’ for advanced teams – Experienced SharePoint developers can still extend and integrate on top of Beacon, using it as a standardised front end layer rather than starting from scratch each time.

Where Beacon Shines: Common Use Cases

Beacon is designed for the everyday pages internal comms teams rely on – and for the bigger moments when you need your intranet to really stand out.

A few of the most common ways our clients use it are:

Intranet Homepages

Combine hero banners, engaging layouts and interactive media for intranet homepages people actually explore

Leadership & Culture Pages

Tell the story of your organisation through About, Vision & Values and leadership content that mixes copy, imagery, quotes and video.

Department & Team Pages

Give HR, IT, Finance and other teams clear, welcoming spaces with signposted content, FAQs and feature areas that still feel part of one intranet.

Knowledge Hubs & Resource Centres

Build brand centres, policy hubs or onboarding spaces where people can quickly find what they need, supported by clearer structure and richer presentation.

News & Updates Hubs

Create eye-catching headline news for maximum impact. When combined with Beacon News, you can also personalise employees’ news feeds.

Campaigns & Announcements

Spin up campaign hubs and homepage takeovers for strategy launches, culture initiatives or change centres.

Intranet homepage & news hub

HR department hub

Homepage takeover

Beacon vs SharePoint Out-of-the-Box

Microsoft is evolving SharePoint’s native page and branding tools, which is great news for intranet owners. With Beacon, our goal is to stay one step ahead of what’s available out-of-the-box.

	SharePoint Out-of-the-Box	Beacon
Custom Fonts	Configure custom fonts in SharePoint Brand Centre	Define custom heading styles and use custom paragraph styles like advanced custom pull-quote styles
Custom Colour Palette	1x primary colour + tints, 1x text colour, 1x background colour	Unlimited colour swatches, with built in accessibility checker
Coloured Section Backgrounds	Choose from 4 colours as defined in your theme (primary colour, tint, light grey and white as default)	Pick from any colour swatch in your custom colour palette
Gradient Section Backgrounds
Image Section Backgrounds	Possible, but only available with black or white image overlays	Choose overlays from your custom colour palette
Custom Section Shapes
Video Banner / Header Backgrounds
Custom Menu Bar Colour	Choose from 4 colours as defined in your theme (primary colour, tint, light grey and white as default)	Pick from any colour swatch in your custom colour palette
Custom Button Colour	Uses the primary colour defined in your theme. Button hover colour is automatically generated	Pick both button and hover colour from your custom colour palette
Sub-brands	Sites within a hub share branding. Different hubs can have their own theme.	Sites within a hub share branding. You can also create separate branding for associated sites.

If you’re committed to sticking with SharePoint’s out-of-the-box tools, that’s fine too. We also offer SharePoint design services that work solely with native capabilities, without adding any extra tools.

Our Other Beacon Tools

Beacon Design is part of a wider suite of SharePoint accelerators that help you get more out of your intranet. With the design tools as the foundation, you can opt to layer on additional Beacon products to go further with navigation and news.

Beacon Links

Beacon Links gives employees a personalised list of tools and quick links, making it easy to jump straight into the apps and pages they use every day.

Beacon News

Beacon News gives employees a personalised intranet news feed, letting them choose the topics and updates they subscribe to so the news they see feels more relevant.

Send us a message

Whether you’ve got a Microsoft 365 project in mind or just want to learn more, we’d love to hear from you.