I wanted to do a quick post to answer a question that I have received a lot lately – “How do I create my own custom buttons like the one in the getting started web part?”
The steps to do this are actually pretty simple, and in this post I will outline them for you. Before you get started though, go ahead and get your images together and uploaded to your SharePoint site so that we can reference them in future steps in the example. Unfortunately this isn’t a place where you can upload the image to the list at the same time you create the list item, so it must first be uploaded to the site.
Create a New Promoted Links Application
To get started, go to the site that you want to have the custom images and create a new application based on the Promoted Links App.
When prompted enter the information for your list and click save / ok. You will notice that the list loads and there are no items in the list. Use the Items Ribbon to create a new list item.
Enter the required information for the list and click save. The key fields you will want to fill in are the Background Image Location (should be a link to an image stored in a SharePoint site) & the Title. These will be the fields that are used in the Tiles view. An example of a completed list item is below:
Continue to add the remaining items that you want to have displayed as Tiles. Once you have added all the items you need, you will want to add the list web part to a page to display the tiles.
You should now see the tiles you configured on the page. Below is an example of a site that is using this approach. In my example I was using the promoted links as a way for them to quickly navigate to content that I wanted to highlight for them.
Jennifer Ann Mason 