Let's not "View All Site Content"

I've been managing our company's new SharePoint (WSS 3.0) "intranet" for about a month or so now and have been slowly introducing features to different departments based on needs. Most of the time, I've simply been setting up the sites, pages or libraries they need and making them accessible through the navigation areas.

Some things were left off of the navigation intentionally, like subsites for special projects and other bits of the SharePoint content that were really meant to stay in the background. However, all of it is accessible using the "View All Site Content" link on the top of the default left navigation bar, much to my dismay.

Turns out, I'm not the only person who wants that link to disappear easily and there are a variety of solutions available on the Internet, depending on your needs. For my organization, I really just needed the link to not be visible. I'm not deeply concerned about people having the permissions to access that view, I just want it to be difficult to get to that view in the first place!

Since I'm not a SharePoint designer guru, nor am I very good at CSS, I wanted a simple solution that would give me the option of removing the link without having to poke around in the "master pages" and whatnot. I found Mark Wagner's post How To: Hide/Remove "View All Site Content", complete with a downloadable solution package that was perfect for my needs. It was quick and easy to install and didn't even require the restart of IIS.