Beginning DotNetNuke® Skinning and Design

Chapter 6. The Neighborhood Association Website

This chapter lays the foundation for constructing a website for a neighborhood association. The first five chapters covered the principles of developing custom DotNetNuke skins from an academic and forensic perspective. This chapter begins a series that will apply these skills to develop a complete website with custom skins and selected modules that fulfill the needs for the audience of the specific website.

The idea of a neighborhood association website has broad applications because it deals with many types of users, serves several purposes, and has distinct branding requirements. The site must reflect the character of the people in the neighborhood and present the information in a compelling and understandable manner. This setting is a good incubator for the skills you've covered in earlier chapters. Now, you'll apply them to a website for a group of people with specific needs.

In this chapter, you design, construct, and configure a fictional neighborhood association website starting from a default DotNetNuke installation. You're taking a step back from the angle brackets and CSS rules used to design a single skin and getting a feel for the overall needs of a website. This activity will help to advise and inform decisions that you will make later on when you dive back into the raw HTML. It's important to understand the intended audience and the capabilities of the core DotNetNuke modules. So, you take a look at both factors throughout ...