One of the modern web parts I use a lot when building pages of my own is the Quick Links web part. I always recommend this web part to end-users building pages because everyone always has a need to link to somewhere else.
Which web part am I talking about? The one highlighted below…
Depending on where you’re putting the links, the layout of the page you’re putting them on, and the look-and-feel of your site, you may want them to look different than standard hyperlinks. Recently, some new UI-styling capabilities were added to this web part. You may want to go back to your old links to utilize some of these cool, new looks! 🙂
To demonstrate the options, I’ll work with a standard set of Travel links using the out-of-the-box Quick Links web part from above (nothing custom here). Each item will link to some other location, either in the same site or elsewhere:
- Travel Partners – links to a page on current site for our Travel partners
- Travel Policy – links to a Policy document on another site
- Travel Request form – links to a Form on current site
It’s important to know these links are not security-trimmed. For example, if an end-user doesn’t have access to the site where the Travel Policy is linked to, they will receive an Access denied message if they click the link.
If you add the links and use the default thumbnail setting, SharePoint will automatically select an icon it feels is the most appropriate for the URL as shown in the example below on My Links Page:
However, once you add the links, you can customize the icon from hundreds of icon options to tailor each link. Below, I’ve updated the 3 links to more closely reflect what it is they’re linking to:
That’s great, but we can even take it a step further! A recent addition to this web part is the ability to customize the links even further by editing the style for the Quick Links web part as a whole (image).
Several styling options are available:
Below are examples of some of the style options – these are great choices to add a bit of context around your links, match the style of your page, and really make your links pop!
With all the new changes rolling out to modern web parts these days, there are lots of ways to customize your modern pages to suit your style. Although you should use these enhancements going forward on new pages, don’t forget to circle back on some of your existing modern pages to take advantage of them there too!
Thanks for reading.
-JCK