Change your Confluence theme to brand your public spaces

People love how easy and flexible it is to create product documentation in Confluence, and make it available to customers via anonymous access.

What they DON’T love is how much their public spaces look like Atlassian – and how little they can do about it.

What everyone really wants is to be able to change the default Confluence theme to something that looks less like Atlassian and more like their own company brand.

So let’s explore the options available natively and on the Atlassian Marketplace.

The importance of a custom Confluence theme

When you make a Confluence space public, it’s because you want your customers to access it. The most likely scenario is product documentation or a knowledge base.

This means your Confluence space is now an extension of your company and brand. And if it’s an extension of your brand, it should look like your brand. Like your website, marketing materials, letters, contracts, any content that your customers see, your product documentation is capable of reinforcing the positive perception people have of your company.

This is why it’s important to find ways of customizing your public Confluence spaces so that they match your brand and what customers expect when they look at your content.

How to change the default theme in standard Confluence

Confluence gives you some control over your documentation’s look and feel. You can incorporate your logo and change the favicon (the tiny website icon that appears in browser tabs). You can also customize the background and accent colors of the Confluence navigation bar at the top of the screen. The accent colors consist of the Create button, hover highlight and menu underline, and the search field border.

Aaaaaand that's about it.

You have the option of changing your entire Confluence theme by selecting Settings > Look and feel > Themes > Choose New Theme. But Confluence doesn’t provide any alternative themes out of the box. If you want something different from the default, you have to install a theme from the Atlassian Marketplace first.

Many of the ‘themes’ on the Marketplace aren’t actually Confluence themes

A new challenge arises when you go to the Atlassian Marketplace to install a Confluence theme. Atlassian tells you to go to Categories > Themes & styles and to select the theme of your choice.

But there are dozens and dozens and dozens, and many of them aren’t Confluence themes at all.

Most of the apps listed within this category are to do with customizing the on-page content with formatting macros, rather than changing the entire Confluence theme. There are a few genuine Confluence theme apps, but you have to do a lot of trawling to find them.

So let’s help narrow down your search by recommending Spacecraft.

How to theme your Confluence site using Spacecraft

Spacecraft is an app that lets you theme your Confluence space with backgrounds, logos, custom fonts and links, a footer, and a custom subdomain.

Basically, it lets you cut out the most important part of your Confluence pages – the content – and build your own website around it.

Theming

You’re able to add a background color or image, customize the page layout and dimensions, incorporate your logo, customize the font and color of your site title, and more.

Custom subdomain

You can set up a custom subdomain that removes ‘Atlassian’ and looks like yourcompany.wikipage.io. This allows you to create something that customers will remember easily.

Quick links menu and footer

Create a custom header menu and footer with links to your website and other content, and customize their appearance and layout.

Hide Confluence elements

One of the most sought-after features of Spacecraft is its ability to hide native Confluence elements such as page authors, comments, and the last-modified date, making your site look much more in tune with your company and its values.

Full macro support

Spacecraft supports Confluence on-page formatting macros like Aura and Karma, and Confluence diagramming apps like draw.io. This allows you to create much more useful and beautiful content than other Confluence theming apps, most of which do not support 3rd-party apps.

Want to add some front end design to your product documentation so that it’s more fluid, more consumable, and helps reinforce your brand? Try Spacecraft free for one month.