Using Emojis in SharePoint Classic Web Part Titles

I recently helped a client create a COVID-19 page on their intranet, which is still using on-premises SharePoint 2013. To add some visual flair to the page, I used emojis in the web part titles.

It’s funny, I haven’t done a lot of work on SharePoint Classic pages in years, and back then emojis were not universally supported. A solution like this would have probably involved some CSS and/or JavaScript to render an icon in the web part title, not to mention uploading icon images to a document library on the site.

This page needed to be created quickly, like in a matter of hours, so a custom solution was not going to be appropriate. I know SharePoint used to get a lot of flak about not being very pretty (my goodness I used to work miracles to redesign and rebrand master pages and page layouts that worked in IE6!), but it has always been highly functional and fast for standing up a web page with a list of documents or links for users to access. That’s exactly what was needed here, and the standard web parts were perfect for what we needed.