The Problem
A problem that I have often seen in the SharePoint world is the common request to have a consistent brand across your entire farm, but therein it is required to have minor variations of that brand for various sites within the farm. A frequent use case for this is the banner image/logo. Maybe the main landing page for the intranet has a certain logo, but as you start drilling into the sub-sites, the logo should change (or other brand variations). Logos for different departments like IT, HR, Sales, etc. are often requested. Now, typically inside the master page would the HTML image tags for these logos be found, however, it can be extremely cumbersome to maintain multiple instances of a given master page, especially when the differences between these master pages is small. Also, you as the developer may not know when when/where these variations need to be implemented, thus you need something intuitive for end users to be able to customize the look and feel of these sites. So what other options are available to you when you need these small brand variations in your SharePoint sites?
The Solution
A good solution for this is the use of delegate controls. You can place these controls within your master page, and at design time (via activating/deactivating features), replace them with actual controls that live in the LAYOUTS directory. What will be demonstrated in this post is using a feature to toggle the banner image on the SharePoint Site.
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