Beginning DotNetNuke® Skinning and Design

Chapter 7. Skinning the Neighborhood Association Website

Chapter 6 set the stage for building an appropriate website for the Neighborhood Association. The modules were installed on the remote server and the essential pages were created. The remote server is currently in a usable state, but it doesn't have any custom skins, yet. The site is displaying the default DNN-Blue skin for all pages.

You haven't done too much with the local development server, but now its time has come. The custom skin will be developed and revised on your local machine. Then, the skin will get bundled up and installed on the remote server. If any skin problems are encountered on the remote site, you can work out the kinks on your local machine, bundle up the skin again, and reinstall it on the remote server.

The first five chapters described the fundamental parts of a skin and how to create a custom design from scratch. This chapter goes deeper and applies the prior skills to several types of pages. First, you'll use the information about the content of the neighborhood association website to plan some custom skins. Next, you'll cover some common ways custom skins can go awry. Finally, you'll use this information to construct and apply a custom set of skins to several pages in the site.

Designing the Site

As you create your own custom skins, you'll find a design technique that suits you. Chapter 5 used a graphical composition of a web page as a starting point for the skin. Designing a giant image file can clear ...