I joined Engage back in early 2006 working with DotNetNuke skinning for both internal and clientèle projects. By working on numerous projects, I found that many people have different conceptions about skinning with DotNetNuke. And I could not satisfy myself with a clear definition of skinning in most of the books that I looked at. Today, let’s talk about skinning and its true meaning, and learn what we can do to fully accomplish a powerful DotNetNuke skinning engine.
Skinning is not a skill; it’s a profession that requires knowledge and experience in understanding the DotNetNuke platform (especially with the skinning engine), web standards, as well as aesthetic design.
I’ve seen many developer created websites and skins with very similar mistakes lately. They all lack of knowledge about principles in web design. In my post about the truth of DotNetNuke Skinning, I mentioned that skinning is not a skill; it takes a bit of knowledge and understanding of the DotNetNuke framework as well as aesthetic design. Many seems to master the first part, however, they all missed the second. By learning how to use Photoshop doesn’t make one becomes a graphic designer.
To assist with future skinning approach, here are the five principles of building a DotNetNuke site or to design a skin. These principles are of course extended to web design and development in general, but the lack of implementation in DotNetNuke community intrigued me to put them together. I hope you all enjoy!
A good friend of mine, Ian Robinson (also a Lead Instructor for Module Development at Engage), went to Texas a few weeks ago to provide training for clients. When he was approached by a potential client asking about skinning, he immediately mentioned my name thought it just helps carried on the conversation. The gentleman took it seriously and asked more about what I have done in the past. Ian struggled to pull out the hard evidence because he doesn't know all the projects that I've worked on since we haven't had time to keep our portfolio up-to-date.
Today, I introduced a quick page listed some of the projects I've done and hope it helps to give a better idea to potential clients of Engage. Although the page you find lacks of detail about the projects, it does carry external links (if applicable) to the live sites so you can have a better look. Some of them are Engage projects and some are my personal work.
I intend to provide more detail about the projects when I get some free time. So if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I'll be happy to talk through the detail of each.
Also, if you find thumbnail images without the links, it's either a work in progress project or an off-line site. But I sure will provide detail of all the screenshots.
A good friend of mine, Chris Hammond, has just recently launched DotNetNukeBlogs.com with a little design effort I put out. The purpose of the site is to aggregate DotNetNuke-related blogs with the hope to provide users a more focus approach to find information.
I first created a few design mock-ups and sent them to Chris, he wasn't thrilled with the color scheme so we came back to stick with the default DotNetNuke color scheme approach.
The site purpose is to house information from different sites, especially blog posts. So I tried to stay with something simple to provide more real estates to accommodate the content.
After the site was designed, I took the XHTML/CSS skinning approach to create a skin package. The site is now running with a CSS layout and using HouseMenu from Tim Rolands. It has been tested in most of the modern browsers and appeared to be working properly.
DotNetNuke has grown quickly over the past few years. But it has only been major changes for the developer community. The question we should ask here is how do we bring the framework closer to the general audiences where all businesses from small to large can understand and utilize it for their online presence?
dnnGallery was introduced to help answer it. dnnGallery is the place to showcase DotNetNuke projects to all audiences from non-technical, business professionals to DotNetNuke developers.
I designed the site with layout to showcase projects in a way that provides valuable information to visitors. Then the design was implemented into a DotNetNuke skin package with XHTML/CSS and Web Standards Compliance approach.
The site was developed with great help from a very good friend of mine, Ian Robinson. Ian also a DotNetNuke training instructor at Engage Software and has extensive knowledge of module development. Some of you may have already known him through taking our training courses at Engage.
It seems a bit obvious to offer some advices in designing a great web site after I posted the principles of DotNetNuke design. But since I ran into many questions asked by friends and clients repeatedly and also saw people made mistakes in the community, I decided to put together this short list in no particular order. Hope it helps in your next projects.
1. Design your site for users, not machines.
2. Navigation is key to better user experience.
3. Leave the creative work to the pros.
4. Build a web site, not creating panes.
5. White space is your friend.
6. No detail is too small.